


PHANTOM OF THE FUTURE SOUND

by HATECADILLAC



Category: Phantom of the Paradise (1974), UTAU, Vocaloid
Genre: (extremely minor and off screen so i'm not tagging a major warning), (for me lol cuz i almost never do present tense), Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - 1970s, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Phantom of the Opera Fusion, Attempted Sexual Assault, Bombing, Character Death, Crimes & Criminals, Crossover, Deal with a Devil, Disfigurement, Drama & Romance, Drug Use, Experimental Style, Exploitation, F/F, Faustian Bargain, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Inspired by a Film, Lesbian Character, Love Triangles, Musicians, Non-Explicit Sex, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Present Tense, Revenge, Same-Sex Marriage, Suicide, Terrorism, Unrequited Love, Violence, Voyeurism, probably i will add stuff as i update lol, spiritual successor to the kaito shion picture show, this is easily THE most niche self indulgent fic i've ever written
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:42:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27137473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HATECADILLAC/pseuds/HATECADILLAC
Summary: "SHE SOLD HER SOUL FOR ROCK N' ROLL!...SHE'S BEEN MAIMED AND FRAMED, BEATEN, ROBBED, AND MUTILATED, BUT THEY STILL CAN'T KEEP HER FROM THE WOMAN SHE LOVES."Iku Acme is a young woman who wants to create heavenly music—even if she has to descend to the depths of hell to do it.
Relationships: Acme Iku & Hatsune Miku, Acme Iku/Kasane Teto, Hatsune Miku/Kasane Teto
Comments: 8
Kudos: 8





	1. goodbye, piko, goodbye

**Author's Note:**

> where's my iku defense squad at let's fucking GOOOOOOOOOOOO

_Miku. She has no other name. Her past is a mystery, but her work is already a legend. She wrote and produced her first gold record at 16. Since then, she's won so many that she tried to deposit them in Fort Knox. She brought cyberpop to Japan. She brought Tokyo to America. She brought music and technology together. Her band, the Zola Project, single-handedly gave birth to the synthetic wave of the 1970s. Now she's looking for the new sound of the spheres to inaugurate her own Xanadu, her own Disneyland...the Future Sound, the ultimate pop palace. This is the story of that search, of that sound...of the woman who made it, the woman who sang it...and the monster who stole it._

—

Friday night at the Yamaha—the Zola Project wraps their set up on a crowd pleaser, as if any of their songs could be considered the opposite from how said crowd surpasses screaming and clamoring into a stunned silent awe. That silence stays with the trailing off of the last note and the vibrating out of the last guitar strum, and all three men look up expectantly into the glass box hovering above their stage; a flash of blue hair with the turning of a head, a flash of white gloves as the unseen pop mogul begins to applaud her approval. The audience joins in a split second later, given the sign, and they wail their love and affection in the vague direction of the grinning Zola Project as they take bows and humbly wave away begging for an encore.

Up in that glass box, Luka Megurine hunches heavy forward on her elbows, greasy pink hair spilling over the small table in front of her as she smokes down her fifth cigarette of the night.

“You know it seems like just yesterday I found Piko in that church choir. I got him singing lessons, taught him how to dress, got his first gig. I got him his first club job, I paid off that columnist. She did a _beautiful_ story on him. I told him who to be nice to, who to—” Her hastily painted lips form the crude word as a Zola Project microphone screeches with feedback and blissfully obscures her harsh voice.

“I fed him the drugs to get through the tours, made his record a hit. Then I sold him to you and _you_ made him the biggest thing in pop. So now what does he do? He fires us, cancels his Vegas date and wants to give free concerts for _orphans_. He was more than a paycheck to me, Miku. He was the height of my career. And now he's _gone_ —”

“Iku Acme, Iku Acme to the wings. The next set begins in five minutes,” A loud and clear androgynous voice rings through the Yamaha’s speaker system and makes Luka cringe. 

Outside, a tall and uncomfortable woman looks up from her unauthorized addition to the enthusiastic _CRYPTON RECORDS PRESENTS THE ZOLA PROJECT_ banner—a pasted-over _IKU ACME AT THE PIANO_ in evenly painted black handwriting. Her long green ponytail whips behind her as she half-runs back into the venue, wincing as a few strands of hair catch and tug in the fresh glue.

“We sued him. We couldn't lose.” Back in the box Luka continues her rant, aggressively tapping her cigarette into an ashtray. “We had an ironclad contract. It was a lock, it was _over_ , it was _closed_. I even bribed the judge. But she said we ‘couldn't sign anyone to a life contract’,” she warbles her voice in what must be a rude mockery of the judge’s voice. “Called us a disgrace to the profession. A _disgrace._ I made him successful enough to be the moneygrubbing manwhore he is today and _I'M_ a disgrace!?”

“And what do you want me to do about it?” Miku asks distantly, bored enough by this conversation that she’s more interested in even the sight of Iku Acme sitting tense at a rolled-in piano and nervously arranging her sheet music down on the stage below. 

Luka keeps running her mouth, spitting venom. “Break him. Discontinue his ass. I’m not gonna stand for this—”

“Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Luka quirks an eyebrow. Miku still doesn’t look at her—keeps her gaze glued to the window of the glass box, to the stage.

“Piko is nothing. Finished, washed up,” Miku explains plainly. It doesn’t track for Luka, who is already fishing for another cigarette as Iku begins to play.

“He’s at the top of the charts.” That same eyebrow from before stays raised, questioning—but certainly not disagreeing, no, never disagreeing with _Miku_ of all people. But Miku can’t care less what Luka’s thoughts on the manner are, contrary or not.

“That’s today, Luka. Tomorrow he’ll be nothing. Besides—we’ve got more important business, you and I.”

Luka groans. “The Future Sound. I _know_ , boss. We’ve looked everywhere…”

Iku plays on, and the sound finally registers for Miku—breaks through the barrier of a faceless newcomer, enters her personal space. She wants to be offended that some chick she’s never heard of is making music she gives a damn about—especially some ugly chick like this ‘Iku Acme’ or whoever—but the music is undeniable. It transcends the nobody playing it; this music is _it._

_“I was not myself last night, in the morning light I could see the change was showing…Like a child who was always poor, reaching out for more, I could feel the hunger growing…”_

Iku keeps her eyes closed as she plays, which is probably the best for her—in the absence of the beloved Zola Project the crowd thins out, save for the occasional couple making out in the Yamaha’s dark corners or stray teenager too stoned to realize the headliner set is over. She pounds the keys of a piano she works as though she’s played it since she was a child, not just with her hands but with her whole body as she sways and wavers. Her voice rings out untrained but present, totally embodied, as though through singing she’s scooping something vital out of herself. Sweat beads on her forehead—from her nerves most certainly, but imagine she’s the first person to break a sweat playing the piano. It would make sense, after all, from how much she’s exerting herself. Exerting, and yet never brash or overwhelming, subdued and plaintive—a platonic ideal. The _music_ is that ideal, channeled through her like a mournful spirit. Her glasses slide down her nose, dangerously close to falling off her face, entirely irrelevant.

“ _And as I lost control, I swore I’d sell my soul for one love…”_

“You just don’t seem to—”

“Listen!” Miku swings one hand out to stifle the reemergence of Luka’s complaint, forcing her subordinate’s attention out of the box and on stage. And listen they do, as the music fills the Yamaha up to bursting:

_“For one love, who would sing my song, and fill this emptiness inside me...One love, who would sing my song, and lay beside me as we dream a bit of style...dream a bunch of friends...dream each other’s smile...and dream it never ends…”_

“That’s it,” Miku says quietly, more quietly than she ever speaks. Luka’s not quite as convinced.

“What?”

“The music to open the Future Sound. After all these years I’ve finally found it—”

“You want _that_ creep to open the Future Sound?” Luka grimaces, eyeing Iku up and down and coming to a less than satisfied conclusion. Miku shakes her head.

“Not _her._ The _music_. Listen to the _music_.”

The end of the song comes, and it has Iku shivering, overtaken, face contorting in what could almost be pain with the power of it all as she slams each key with more feeling than the poor instrument can even begin to fully express.

 _“All my dreams are lost, and I can’t sleep...and sleep alone could ease my mind...All my tears have dried, and I can’t weep...Old emotions, may they rest in peace…!_ ”

Iku takes in a huge gasping breath when it finally ends, like she’s being reborn, and opens her eyes to a near-empty Yamaha. About what she expected—but it’s something. There’s someone here who’s heard it, even one person, and that’s _something_. She knows that Miku is here but she doesn’t consider _that_ as even a possibility—she doesn’t have a clue what’s going on in the box, where Miku is nearly pressed up against the glass, enraptured. She, too, remembers to breathe again, chest rising and falling in a nearly post-coital rhythm as Luka speaks her concern once more.

“Well, what do I do with _her?_ ”

Miku turns to her, and her expression is almost entirely unreadable—but her mouth curls just so at one corner, and after fifteen years working under her Luka knows full well what it means.

“You’ll think of something.”

Luka fills in the gap and grins for the both of them—she’ll think of something, _sure_ she will. It’s one of the things she does best.

—

“Uh—Miss Acme?”

Luka ducks into the belly of the wings where Iku is hunched over at that piano again, trying to manage an absurdly large stack of sheet music and put it back into her bag. She looks up only as Luka raps the thin plywood wall with her knuckles in lieu of knocking on a real door. Iku frowns—interrupted—but lets Luka in, metaphorically speaking.

“Hello.”

“Yeah, hello. My name’s Luka Megurine,” she dives straight into, awkwardly maneuvering through the wing’s narrow false-hallway to meet Iku eye-to-eye and force a casual sensibility into their conversation. “Listen, I scout talent for Miku. She’s interested in your stuff.”

Iku’s eyes light up in the cultural Pavlovian response. “ _The_ Miku?”

“That’s right. She said your sound could be real big.”

“Really…?”

“Yeah, I was sitting right next to her.”

A goofy grin starts working itself into Iku’s features, pulling the corners of her mouth up. It sickens Luka a little, but it’s a familiar sight in her line of work. “If Miss Miku was producing my music—the whole world would listen to me.”

“The game plan exactly,” Luka encourages, putting a hand firmly on Iku’s shoulder and sliding comfortably into the thesis statement of her job: hype. “But you need a lot of work, a lot of polishing.”

Iku nods. “Oh, I know, Miss Megurine. I have a long way to go.”

Luka resists the urge to roll her eyes, but they twitch in their sockets with the idea. “Yeah. Now, do you have tapes of any of your stuff?”

The grin slips a little, and Iku pats the intimidating stack of sheet music with one hand and pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose with the other. “Uh, I don’t, unfortunately, but it’s all written down here.” She stands, towering over Luka more so than the other woman would prefer, and picks up the bound stack in motion to hand it over.

“Great. Well, why don’t you give us two or three of the really good up numbers and—”

“Up numbers?” Iku’s face wrinkles with confusion, but quickly smooths out again with a breathy giggle. “Oh, I should’ve explained. The scope of this cantata is two or three hundred pages long, and it’s not finished yet…”

“Well, never mind the sonata. We just want the songs.”

“You don’t get it,” Iku continues, a new light behind her slightly-dirty lenses; a light Luka recognizes with an internal groan as that of the music geeks she went to school with before she dropped out. “It’s not just songs, it’s _more._ It’s a _lot_ more.”

Luka just blinks once or twice. “Yeah, you’re right, I’m not getting you, kid.”

“It’s a whole series of songs that tell the story of Faust.”

“Who?”

“ _Faust_.”

“What label is he on?”

“Faust was a legendary German magician,” Iku explains, and the groan in Luka threatens stronger. “He sold his soul to the devil for worldly experience and knowledge.”

Luka finally scoffs out loud, leans perilously against the plywood. “What is this, school time? I got a plane to catch. You either dig a song or you don’t. Now, I like your stuff, kid,” she keeps hyping as she does best, “I think it’s terrific. And you know what?”

“What?”

“I think the Zola Project is gonna dig it.”

A new and different light goes on that Luka can’t recognize, and that Iku feels the switch for with a pulse of hot anger. “The Zola Project…?”

Luka nods, swinging and missing. “I’m not promising anything. First—”

But first Iku takes an unexpected big step forward and grabs the sides of Luka’s open jacket with both hands, shockingly strong for such a geeky-looking woman as she pushes Luka hard against the plywood with an audible _crack_ of something. She gets up right in Luka’s face, glasses foggy.

“I’m _not_ gonna let my music get mutilated by those greaseballs!”

“Relax, kid—” Luka squeaks out in a voice less dignified than she likes, heart gearing up for a marathon as she tries to diffuse and is largely ignored.

“ _I’m_ the only one who can sing Faust!”

“ _Relax!_ It was just an idea.” Initial surprise fades to a vague annoyance as Luka gets control over her breathing again—it’ll be harder to ‘think of something’ than she was banking on, if the girl has a hair trigger like that. She keeps that to herself and keeps up her appeasement: “Miku makes all these decisions, you know?”

Iku runs out of steam, and her shoulders droop; she sighs, backs off of Luka and sits down again with a slight shiver and a look of embarrassment. “I’m sorry. It’s just I worked so hard on this thing.”

“It’s okay, kid,” Luka fixes her jacket and steps away from the wall, feigning water under the bridge. “Boy, you got some temper.”

“I’m sorry,” Iku apologizes again, looking pointedly down at the ripped cuffs of her jeans. “I don’t know what comes over me.”

“It’s alright. Relax. Just take it easy.” Luka knows she’s repeating herself—time to get this show on the road and never lay eyes on this chump again. “Why don’t you give me the music? Miku will take a look at it on the plane and we’ll get right back to you. But if you ask me, we’re gonna be producing your first album,” she finishes with a forced grin, putting one hand on the stack of sheet music and tapping poorly-painted nails against the surface in an impatient rhythm.

“Really?”

And that last rush of awe is just the opportunity Luka needs to pick up the stack and carry it under her arm, to wave an excited goodbye to Iku and lie through her teeth with a _talk to you REAL soon_ , to get out of that stuffy backstage and out onto the street with a sigh of relief that matches the whistle of the night wind around her. The weight of the sheet music under her arm is a reassurance, a promise all of its own—its _good_ music, after all. Miku was right: they can open the Future Sound with this no problem. Part of her feels bad for the kid, for a second at first, but then she remembers getting shoved into the plywood and remembers Iku’s dumb glasses and her whole stupid _Faust_ thing and it becomes incredibly funny to hand the whole stack over to Miku and sit on the plane watching her scratch Iku’s name off each page.


	2. faust

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> will update tags for this but! in this chapter there is a brief description here of an off-screen attempted sexual assault. it's very minor but pls stay safe/comfortable! ~~not like there's even anyone reading this thing lol~~

Iku sits by the phone for a month and a month passes with radio silence from Crypton Records—a month of working her shitty barista job and a month of panicking, unable to find her cantata anywhere in her tiny apartment, before remembering and falling immediately at giddy ease. That ease lasts for about two weeks—then it turns to confusion, then annoyance—annoyance with just a touch of soul-consuming fear.

So she takes a deep breath and she takes two subways downtown to the big Crypton Records building that stretches higher up into the sky than she can see without falling over craning her head back. The wind whips her coat all directions as her hands struggle and reach for the handles, pulling open the surprisingly heavy doors and walking in for the first time. 

She assumes she should get used to this building, since she’ll probably be spending lots of time in it from now on, but that doesn’t change the overwhelming experience of taking it all in new. She’d expected something decadent and over-the-top, something like how the Future Sound is going to look when it opens, but the Crypton Records building is actually quite minimalist: sleek black-and-white, open space, gold records lining the walls with even spacing just in case you forgot where you were. A desk at the far end of the room where a bored looking blonde woman sat with huge over-ear gold headphones—that’s where Iku goes, picking up the clue.

The woman looks up as she approaches—the name tag on her Crypton Records t-shirt reads _CYVA_ —and she tilts her sunglasses to take Iku in with disinterested amber eyes and says nothing.

“Hello. I’m Iku Acme,” Iku prompts, assuming this will jog a memory of a conversation Luka or even Miku has had with the Crypton Records staff—still no response.

“Yeah?” Cyva rebutts, and Iku frowns.

“Uh, Miss Megurine said Miss Miku was gonna call me about producing my first record,” she explains, skirting the line cautiously between grin and grimace. “Said she’d get right back to me. That was a month ago.” That pushes it—Iku’s face strains unmistakably with her displeasure.

Cyva openly rolls her eyes, then bends over with her face out of sight to start thumbing through the heavy file of names under her desk. “One moment, please.”

Her eyes trail down the dizzying list of prospective Crypton Records artists until she finds _Acme, Iku_ sandwiched unobtrusively between _Abe, Susumu_ and _Amakune, Ichigo_ with simply a handwritten note on an index card: 

_NEVER TO BE SEEN AGAIN._

Straightforward enough. Cyva looks up at Iku again and there is something approaching pity there, but clouded over by an unbanishable apathy. Iku smiles, expecting, and Cyva returns it for a split second—before the hand still under the desk leaves the files and seeks out a little silver button with its fingers, jamming it with the sound of a tinny claxon that makes Iku jump in her skin. 

Then before she knows what’s happening Iku is being chased, then carried under the armpits, out of Crypton Records by two denim-clad security guards she can’t tell apart. She comes to her senses again sprawled on the sidewalk out front, groaning and cracking her back as she sits up. She’s not stupid enough to try and go back in—but not stupid enough to give this up, either. 

So Iku stakes out Crypton Records until the sun goes down and the streets are dark, until she sees a flash of pink hair disappear into an unmarked car underneath a black hoodie and a sunhat. That’s the cue—stumbling hard over her boots, nearly pitching over onto the concrete, she dashes to the curb and hails for a taxi like her life depends on it. She’s already climbing in as it rolls to a more than a little concerned idle. 

“Just follow that car!”

—

Iku tumbles out of the cab even more hastily than she got in, if that’s possible, half-throwing more money than she owes into the driver’s side window before hitting the sidewalk in the vague direction of the heavy iron gate the car just drove through. Even without the two security guards from before mulling about outside Iku would know she had the right place—in the distance looms the night-shadowed outline of Mikunopolis, only the most notorious celebrity party palace this side of the States (second to nothing but the anticipation of the Future Sound). The kind of place people whisper about and never write about, the kind of place you go in one way and exit a whole other—if you exit at all. Above all the kind of place Iku had dreamed of going in some odd and distant way but now felt only a growing dread about.

She keeps her hurried pace on light feet, skirting the security guards and scrabbling up the low stone wall beside the gate to land over the other side with her bag clutched tight against her chest. A little ways away the car had slowed to a stop on the road outside; Iku huffs a tense breath in the unseasonably cold air and starts on her wavering, cautious approach.

She starts to get an idea of what’s happening once she’s close enough to hear the music coming through the windows, foggy and thudding from an unseen speaker inside:

_“Never thought I’d get to meet the Devil...never thought I’d meet him face to face...always heard he’d worked ‘til dawn, seldom wrote or used a phone, so I walked right up and met him at his place…”_

And she smiles as the idea comes, straining the corners of her lips unnaturally and devoid of joy. _They’re playing my tape_ , she makes herself rationalize, choosing to forget the absence of a tape and the decidedly male vocals that get only clearer as she pushes the heavy door open and keeps her head down. Surprisingly enough there’s no one else in this main room, the one where they’re playing someone else singing her song—its easier than she thought to beeline for the next door deeper inside Mikunopolis, both out of her urge to ambiguously _get-to-the-bottom-of-this_ and her more self-serving need to get away from the first sign that the thing she was getting more and more sure had happened had really happened.

But that deeper room is no more than the final nail in the coffin for Iku’s hope that she was catastrophizing; it doesn’t take a genius to realize what’s going on in here. Girls—hundreds of girls, lined up, lounging about, singing. Singing against each other, in incoherent cacophony, but all singing the very same thing—

_“All my dreams—”_

_“All my dreams are lost, and I can’t—”_

_“I can’t sleep, and sleep alone—”_

_“And sleep alone could ease my mind…”_

Practicing.

Hundreds of girls—hundreds of voices, hundreds of different styles—Iku has to put her hands over her ears for a second to even think, overwhelmed, knees knocking.

_My cantata! They’re auditioning girls for my cantata!_

The terror and confusion lasts for one painful, burning second—and then it floods out of Iku entirely. The breath in she takes fills her whole body as she walks briskly up the stairs.

_Well, okay. Who’s singing it best?_

She finds her answer in a short red-haired woman near the end of the loose line that’s winding up the stairs into another unseen room; one Teto Kasane, though Iku won’t learn this for quite some time. The draw is a voice flatter and noticeably lower than Iku’s own, cutting through the others and coming out on top over the heavy sound with a biting confidence. Her shoulders, too, are more relaxed than anyone else’s, her posture more casual. She’s good, and she knows it. She’s also _gorgeous_ , but that registers as reasoning for Iku only subconsciously, once her feet are already moving.

Teto looks at Iku as she hastily worms up the stairs and through the crowd (drawing the displeased eye of about twenty _more_ women on her way), her curly hair bouncing in its twin drills on either side of her head with the turn. Iku purses her lips tight, afraid her mouth will vomit words up against her will...but that odd sort of calm, despite everything, works its magic on her again, and she even manages to give a smile.

“Uh, hi. Where’d you get that song?”

Teto looks over her shoulder first, as though there were someone else Iku could have been talking to, then answers in a voice that matches the one she sings in almost uncannily.

“Well, I got it from Luka, to audition with. Are you trying out too?”

“Sing it again, please.” 

The tension starts to show, and Teto frowns, shifting a little uneasily like she’s feeding off the same energy. “Why?”

“Just go ahead. Sing it.” The smile is a grimace now—but Teto raises her eyebrows and obliges, clearing her throat a little.

_“All my dreams are lost, and I can’t sleep…”_

_“And sleep alone could ease my mind…”_ Iku joins in, a little rusty from lack of practice but with the confidence of someone who knows what they’re singing—well, of _course_ she knows what they’re singing. Teto’s eyes widen at this, and Iku keeps back a satisfied smirk as they finish the section out together, voices fitting together in an unacquainted but exploratory rhythm.

 _“All my tears have dried, and I can’t weep...Old emotions, may they rest in peace…!_ ”

“That’s incredible! How’d you know it so well without the sheet music?” Teto asks, a big grin spreading across her face in a marked improvement over her initial hesitance—the power of music, one might suppose. Iku can’t help returning it a little even through the growing pit in her stomach, leaning forward for dramatic effect as she half-whispers the answer. 

“I wrote the song.”

“Come on,” a groan shocks Iku and makes her startle—the source is a perfectly androgynous singer to her right, one hand on a hip and the other popping in a single red contact lens as they stare Iku down with a look of pure skepticism. One Ruko Yokune, though Iku won’t learn this ever. “If you wrote this stuff, why aren’t you in there with Miku auditioning us? Huh, bigshot?”

Well, wouldn’t Iku like to know the answer to that, too? “I dunno. There must’ve been some sort of mix-up.”

“Oh, sure.” Ruko doesn’t seem convinced, rolling their now heterochromic eyes and turning away again to continue practicing. Teto is more sympathetic, frowning with her plight as she tries to explain.

“They must not know who you are—your name’s not on the music.”

Iku keeps talking through the stab of realization she now can’t avoid thinking about—about what she had begun expecting, after all. “Well, that’s funny. Miku heard me sing that song. Why’s she auditioning a bunch of girls for my cantata? I only sing it solo.”

“You haven’t heard?” Ruko pipes up again, voice low and taking up space—Iku hasn’t heard, and doesn’t know if she wants to. “She’s opening the Future Sound with it.”

_For real? For fucking real? Am I hearing this right now?_

“You’re kidding.”

They frown. “Do I looklike a kidder?”

“She’s opening the Future Sound with _my_ cantata?” Iku turns back to Teto, eyes wide, seeking her on some instinct. She gives Iku a happy grin back.

“Yes! Isn’t that great?”

Great, maybe—but so frightening, too, alongside everything. “Gee, I wish she’d told me.”

“She’s just auditioning girls for a back up chorus.”

“But—” Iku trips on her tongue just a second, brain searching for the words in a moment where words aren’t making sense together. “But, you know, you’re a really good singer. You shouldn’t be wasting your time in a chorus.”

“To be honest with you—I don’t care where I sing this music.” All at once Teto gets a serious look in her eyes, which are wide and pretty, red as her hair. “Hey, look...can you help me? I know I can sing these songs better than anybody. And you’re the composer, so if you vouch for me I _know_ I can get a part in the chorus.”

“Sure, I’d love to help you,” Iku nods and answers faster than she means to—she’s always been a sucker for a pretty girl, after all, and even if she hadn’t wanted to in the first place the grateful smile that breaks over Teto’s face would have changed her mind in a heartbeat.

“You’re not just doing this to be nice, are you?”

Iku shakes her head. “I would never let my personal desires influence my aesthetic judgement.”

The smile fades on Teto’s face, confusion sliding into its place. “Um...what’s that mean?”

Now it’s Iku’s turn to smile. “It means I think you’re terrific.”

It goes over Teto like a wave and pulls her lips back into that smile again, almost against her own will, and before Iku can get another word in she leans forward and pulls her into a tight, genuine hug. It throws Iku off guard—the suddenness of it, and the depressing fact that it’s been a while since she was last hugged—but how on earth could she not reciprocate? Their height difference means Iku has to lean forward over Teto to return her embrace, deepening it by necessity, and it is so warm and so nice, even with everything. For a moment they hug, and the context of their meeting fades out to an ignorable buzz, meaningless for now.

But then a crude, barking voice pierces the amiable chatter among the prospective chorus girls, shutting them up as they all look to the top of the stairs. A voice Iku doesn’t recognize, but a face that curdles in her stomach as she and Teto separate—the male twin of the security guards stands with his hands on his hips, like a man on top of the world. His lips curl into a shit-eating smirk as he surveys his kingdom.

“Hey! Alright, let’s get in line, everybody, gotta quick it up a little bit. Move in quietly,” he commands, and the ambiguous linear group of girls straightens itself out into a proper line that feeds forward onto the second floor as the blonde numbers each girl off. Iku moves with them, clinging to Teto’s side, attempting to blend in. “One, two, three, four...come on, come on...five, six, seven, eight…”

But when the two of them reach the top step the security guard frowns and holds out a hand. 

“Oh, wait, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute.”

Teto stops, looking at Iku nervously before returning her gaze to the man with a confused expression. But his eyes are trained solely on Iku, a recognition in them that can’t be fully masked by the ignorance he feigns with his words—some underlying bile that makes Iku shiver a little.

“Hey, are you auditioning, too?”

Iku shakes her head, forcing an airy and casual demeanor despite the nerves firing away in her stomach. “Oh, no, I’m Iku Acme, the composer—”

“Eh, that’s great, that’s great,” The guard immediately starts to talk over her, waving a hand dismissively an inch away from Iku’s face. “Listen, you’re too tall for chorus, babe, hate to break it to you. Five-four to five-six only, Miku’s request.”

“But I have to talk with h—”

Iku puts a hand on the guard’s forearm, and that same hand waving from before grabs the collar of Iku’s coat tighter than anticipated, pulling her up a stair to bring them unpleasantly face to face. He bares his teeth like a dog before speaking again. The singers look concerned—Teto the most so—but do nothing, understandably concerned for their own skins. There’s embroidery above a chest pocket of his denim jacket that Iku is now close enough to read, _Len_ in girly cursive script, and the absurdity of it almost makes her want to laugh— _why, hello, Len, nice to meet you!_

“Don’t give me a hard time, babe. You wanna see Miku, you get on the phone and you make an appointment like everybody else.”

“I did that and they threw me out,” Iku squeaks pathetically.

Len grins. “Then they don’t wanna see you.”

“But I wrote the music—”

“Look, why don’t you just _get out of here!_ ” Len’s voice climbs frighteningly in volume as he lets Iku go and half-shoves her, launching her against her will into a fast and stumbling walk down the stairs as she covers her head and weaves through the concerned looking girls. She wants to feel fear, or anger, and she does eventually—what kicks in first is _embarrassment_. Her heart beats quicker than she can recall it beating in a long time.

“Iku, look, I’ll tell her you’re around,” Teto calls from the top of the stairs down to her, prompting her to turn around and catch the sheepish, guilty look on the other’s face—which only makes Iku’s embarrassment dig deeper than before. She only sees that look for a moment as Teto is grabbed by the shoulder and ushered harshly towards the door down the hall.

“I’ll wait for you, good luck,” Iku calls back up, but doesn’t count on it being heard. For a moment she stands in suspended motion halfway down the stairs, watching Teto get further and further away, before she swallows hard and follows, half-jogging at a concerned pace. She can’t shake this dread she feels about the whole thing—now not only for herself but for Teto, too, watching how roughly the guard is pulling her, how briskly he’s walking with her in tow. 

As the door opens Iku darts behind a curtain, fearing being spotted, so she sees only a glimpse of what’s in store for the singer that turns her veins ice. Certainly like no audition Iku’s ever seen, that’s for sure—most of what she can see through the door is taken up by a couch that Luka climbs off of to reveal a squirming, grimacing auditionee underneath her. The yet-unseen female security guard lifts her effortlessly over the back of the couch for Teto to take her place. Len passes her off to his twin and goes to shut the door and his twin pushes Teto onto the couch and Luka pounces on her in an instant and Iku is only just starting to understand what’s happening by the time the door shuts with a sound that shakes her whole body.

There’s a scream that can only belong to Teto, and then silence. Iku approaches the door with quick and flighty steps, morbidly desperate to find out what happens, until she flinches back at the sound of another scream and the door flinging open for Teto to storm out with angry tears in her eyes.

“Why won’t you just let me _sing!?_ ” she shouts back at an annoyed looking Luka, who goes for a retort that gets shut off by Teto slamming the door behind her and sniffling as she quickly goes for the stairs. Iku keeps pace with her, instantly concerned.

“What’s the matter?”

“It was _awful_ , Luka tried to—” Teto’s chest constricts with a sob and she doesn’t finish her thought; Iku understands. “I just, I can’t do it, not _that_ way. I came here to _sing_.”

“That didn’t even sound like an audition—”

“Leave me _alone!_ ” Teto pushes against Iku’s chest and stops her in her tracks before dashing down the stairs, burying her face in one elbow to repress her crying. Iku takes a few steps forward towards her before reconsidering.

“I’m really sorry, uh—did you tell her who I am?”

No answer. Iku grimaces as she watches those twin tails bounce violently further and further away. A more desperate question— “What’s your name?” inspires similar silence. Distantly, Iku hears the sound of the big front door shutting behind someone. She hardly has a moment to figure out just what the fuck she’s going to do next before she hears a painfully familiar male voice bark at her.

“Hey—come here, buddy!”

Iku turns on her heels to find both security guards have left the “audition” room, now staring her down at the end of the hall with both arms crossed over both chests. Iku starts walking towards them the same instant they start walking towards her, gulping with the inevitability of this interaction as she goes headlong into it. She gets close enough to read the woman’s jacket embroidery, too, _Rin_ in the same font, and _isn’t that fun_ , she thinks as the two grab her under the armpits without a word. _Rin and Len, or is it Lin and Ren, maybe they really ARE twins._ She’s beyond thinking scared or even angry—all she thinks of is how she’s going to get back in here once she gets kicked out and told never to show her face in Mikunopolis again. Scared or even angry as she is, to give up now would be more than laughable: it would be embarrassing.

Her plan starts to take shape, vague and unwieldy, but a plan nonetheless: “Do you guys know where a good department store is?” She asks either or both of them in an absurdist inside joke with herself.

Rin grins wide. “Yeah, sure, we’ll take you right now.”

And then of course she’s getting thrown unceremoniously onto the lawn outside Mikunopolis with the whole _get-out-and-stay-out_ spiel, wincing as she lands flat on her face into the wet grass. But she gets up again, pinching her lightly bleeding nose, and she makes her way to a good department store after all.


	3. greetings from sing sing

“So, when do I get to sing, huh?”

Ruko turns over to face the skinny silver-haired woman lying next to them in a room deep in Mikunopolis that would have made Teto scream and tear her hair out to even think about. They think they remember that her name is Tei, not that it really matters. Like the audition before it’s all _girls_ : fifteen or twenty girls on an unthinkably large circular bed, piled on top of each other in varying states of undress. Somewhere on the edge of sex, sound overlaps—shallow breathing, shallower conversation, the occasional moan from an act politely looked away from. The sort of thing you hear rumors about in places like this, too strange to seem real outside of a particularly cheesy Penthouse letter. Not that Ruko’s complaining, of course. _I can’t believe it happened to me,_ indeed.

“I don’t think much _singing_ goes on around here,” Tei remarks with something between a smirk and a sneer on her face, gesturing nondescriptly to the writhing mass of bodies around them. “I’ve been here twelve times already and I still don’t get to sing. I just get to come _back_.”

“Then what are we even _doing_?”

Tei rolls her eyes, doesn’t bother gesturing again. “Figure it out.”

Then she’s moving forward in a languid gesture to half-drape over Ruko, bodies close and faces even closer. Ruko’s _definitely_ not complaining now, _fuck_ no, not with a face and a body like that. “Don’t you know how to sing on your back?”

Ruko laughs, watches the motion of it move Tei in response from how on top of them she is. “Never tried.”

“Well, if you can sing standing up, you can sing lying down.” Tei moves an imperceptible degree forward and coerces their lips into meeting, and Ruko can’t answer because they get _way_ too busing kissing back to think. They close their eyes and kiss, and at some point Tei’s tongue enters their mouth, and at another her hands are on their waste, and all those moments blur into each other and mean little more than a thick soup of physical sensation.

Tei pushes one of their bra straps down their shoulder—when did their shirt come off, anyway?—and that’s where Ruko stills and draws a line: “Hey, no way. Saving that for Miku,” they only half-joke. It’s on the mind of every girl there, after all— _hey, if I already got this far, then maybe…?_

Tei props herself up onto her hands, elbows bending double-jointed, and just grins. “Come on, she’s not gonna miss anything.” She leans in like she’s going to pick things up again, but she bypasses Ruko’s lips to go whisper an open secret directly in their ear. “You’re being auditioned _right now_.”

“What do you mean?”

“This whole place is on video,” Tei elaborates, pointing vaguely upwards towards the darkened ceiling of Mikunopolis. Sure enough, there in shadow on catwalks stand anonymous camera operators, pointing and shooting the scene below with unreadable, individual expressions.

One of those operators shivers in her boots, price tag still sticking out from the back of her non-uniform Crypton Records t-shirt and green ponytail sticking more damningly out from the back of her trucker hat, but we’ll get back to her later.

“You’re kidding.” Back to Ruko, who’s less bothered by all of this than they know they probably should be, lavished into submission.

“No. Miku’s watching us _right now_. She _likes_ to watch us.”

“Watch us doing what?”

The answer is obvious, but Tei answers anyway with a smirk like she’s telling someone else’s secret. “Doing each other.”

“Oh, yeah, huh.”

“That’s how she gets turned on!”

Speak of the devil—what Ruko had sworn was a mirror swings open to reveal its dual nature as a door in which a figure stands silhouetted, emerging from a cloud of generated fog to the delighted gasps of every girl who looks up on instinct. There’s no need to ask who it is—the twin tails hanging down in shadow to the figure’s ankles speak for themselves.

“Miku!”

“Oh my God, Miku!”

“Miku, over here!”

But the sharpest and clearest voice, the one that makes Miku look up into the catwalk and lower her sunglasses, comes from our beloved and stupid green-ponytailed camera operator, cupping a hand near her mouth to make the sound carry.

“Miss Miku, up here, you remember me, I’m Iku Acme!”

The girls all look upward and frown, fun spoiled, but all Miku does is avert her gaze—making a signal, unbeknownst to Iku, for Rin and Len to leave their post in the fog-obscured room and head briskly up to the catwalk. Iku tries again, voice cracking with unhidden desperation. “Miku! Over here!”

By the time Miku looks up again, tilts her glasses enough for Iku to meet her bored blue eyes, the twins are on either side of Iku with arms crossed. Iku gets the joke a second too late, face falling as she hears Miku’s spoken voice for the very first time in her life.

“Get this bitch out of here.”

And predictably Iku is being grabbed under the armpits for the third time that day, getting dragged away in front of this whole crowd, and what admittedly little dignity she was preserving this whole time disappears as her hat falls off her head and gets stomped under Rin’s boot heel. She’s shrieking, desperately clawing for Miku’s eye contact again as her future seems to spiral out and away from her.

“Miss Miku, it’s me, Iku, don’t you remember? I gave Miss Megurine a copy of my cantata, you know, _Faust_ , you were supposed to look at it and do it, you're auditioning girls for my cantata _I’M IKU ACME I WROTE IT!”_

And looking back in the last moment Miku is visible, as the auditionees swarm her like nothing happened at all, Iku swears she sees her smirk.

Rin and Len drop her on the pavement this time and Iku swears she hears something crack—her nose will be bleeding again for sure, at the very least. She tries to get up but manages little but a crawl, towards the cool relief of the lawn where she sinks back to the ground with a sigh. Mud smears on her face along with the blood that must be there, and she’s distantly aware of the absolute _state_ she must be in—but that doesn’t register beyond the haze of what wants to be confusion and instead is so much abject terror. No, she’s not confused about what’s just happened, but she _is_ terrified.

She only has a few moments to wallow in her misery before the toe of a boot nudges her shoulder and flips her ragdoll-esque onto her back. Blinking as she adjusts to the change of view and shakily puts her glasses back on, she has to focus her eyes to be sure she’s not seeing double; two identical looking faces frown down at her, identical outfits, differentiated only by haircut. _Awfully familiar_ , Iku thinks bitterly. But she recognizes those outfits, recognizes the lazy red-and-blue blinking of lights at the edge of her field of vision—it’s the police. For the first time that night, a flicker of hope lights in her.

“Hey, I think that’s her.”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Nothing...” It’s harder to talk than Iku expects. The cop that addressed her—the one with the ponytail like her—puts her hands on her hips and frowns deeper.

“What, cat got your tongue?”

“No, ma’am, I’m—I’m Iku Acme, the composer…”

“What are you doing outside Mikunopolis?”—that’s the other cop, whose hair is short and choppy under her hat like she cut it herself. She kneels next to Iku, far too close for comfort.

“Listen, officers, you gotta help me,” Iku croaks, and for the very first time that night begins to cry—thick, desperate tears that stop her throat up even more and make her near incomprehensible as she rambles on. “Miku’s got my music and she’s pretending she doesn’t even _know_ me, she had me thrown out of the mansion a-and I think they broke my _nose_ —”

“She didn’t wanna buy what you had to sell, did she?” The short-haired cop furrows her brow, unsympathetic. Iku matches the expression, unsure of what else to do with the statement that barely penetrates her brain on top of everything else.

“Wh…? She didn’t say anything about buying anything…” Iku sniffles pathetically, and both cops look at her for a moment longer with those same scrutinizing expressions—before they turn to each other, taking Iku out of the conversation.

“Anon...what’s she got in her purse?”

“I dunno, Kanon. Guess I’ll take a look,” Iku is too busy assigning their names to their bodies— _short hair Anon, long hair Kanon, okay_ —to protest as Anon reaches underneath her to yank out her purse where it’s pinned under her chest. Still kneeling, she opens Iku’s bag, smiling and making eye contact with her in what Iku is only just realizing—horrifyingly—is _performance_.

Kanon, performing a co-role with the same eye contact, reaches in the pocket of her uniform to produce a plastic baggie tied with a rubber band. Filled, of course, with a white substance anyone in the music business knows well enough to recognize by sight. She drops it nonchalantly into Iku’s purse, shrugging. “Miss Miku _did_ say she had it on her.”

“Of course. I should’ve guessed blow.”

Iku opens her mouth and closes it again, rendered a fish out of water as her voice dies in her throat and refuses to come out. Only her eyes manage to communicate her feeling—wide, afraid, above all stunned into silent submission.

Kanon kneels alongside her partner to look Iku just as closely in the face, a deranged sort of glee on her own. “Do you know what you could get for pushing in this state?”

Before Iku can think to guess, Anon and Kanon are turning towards each other, sharing a knowing grin and shouting their answer in unison.

_“LIFE!”_

—

_“BUT I’M INNOCENT! MIKU STOLE MY MUSIC AND FRAMED ME…!”_

—

“We are very fortunate here at our humble institution to be included in the Dental Health Research Program,” the warden explains in a loud, clear voice, habitually pushing his unmanageably long purple hair back behind his ears as he paces in front of the line of new arrivals. One of these arrivals, her desperate plea altogether ignored by the judge who sentenced her just as Anon and Kanon predicted, is Iku Acme—who, all things considered, is feeling pretty okay. As though she’s gone far enough past misery to cycle back to a sort of dazed indifference, apathy for whatever happens to her here at rock bottom.

“This is a volunteer program generously funded by the Miku Foundation. You are all volunteers.” The glint of pride in the warden’s eyes takes on a sadistic light, and though it may be Iku’s imagination she can’t help but shiver and feel he’s looking right at her. “All your teeth will be pulled. Teeth are a source of infection, and it pays to be on the safe side.” He pauses by his desk to casually pick up a small model, shows it to the line of inmates as though to get their feedback. It’s a cast of a human mouth, one full of metal teeth—there’s no further explanation, but the implication of it makes Iku’s blood freeze. “Any questions?”

Iku swallows hard, shakily raises her hand. This time the warden _does_ look at her, stopping in his pacing and nodding sharply to tell her to go ahead. Her voice is small and rough from disuse in her mouth as she looks sharply down at the floor.

“Uh, sir, pardon me, but, I’m not a volunteer. I’m innocent. I don’t want you to take my teeth out.”

The warden considers this for only a second—looking unimpressed—before he takes a step back, sits on the edge of his desk and smiles at the lot of them. “Show of hands. How many women here are innocent?”

And Iku watches, in embarrassed horror, as every other inmate in the line with her raises their hand. The warden takes this sight in with a cocky, pleased expression as he returns his attention to Iku.

“Would you look at that? All innocent. Now, come on, ladies, single file, you’ll be seeing the dentist in groups of three…”

—

And Iku makes it six months in prison, which to her credit is longer than anyone in her life before probably would have guessed. Her metal teeth sting, and she weeps through the night, but otherwise she lives in a kind of numbness, static and unchanging. Something builds up in her that she cannot identify, neutral in feeling and striking in presence, but it keeps her propelled nonetheless. She thinks about killing herself once, early on, but fails to work up the energy—and what would be the point, anyway? She resigns herself to six months of accidentally poking herself with the tentatively whittled-down sharp point of her toothbrush.

Then one day she’s on the assembly line, building toys for children she will never meet, and the radio’s playing:

_“...and good morning, y’all. This is Sweet Ann here on WCHD. Well, Miku has another golden disk to deposit in Fort Knox. Her fabulous group, the Zola Project on the Crypton Label, has taken the charts by storm. And get this, kids, in just a few short weeks you can see the Zola Project LIVE at the grand opening of the Future Sound! That's right! Miku's pop palace is scheduled to open at last, and with this dynamite sound! So let's hear it again: The Zola Project singing Miku's Faust...!”_

Something clicks distinctly in the back of Iku’s head.

Her legs are moving under her fast enough that her upper body can’t exactly keep up, propelling her towards the first person in sight—an unsuspecting young guard who shrieks when Iku descends on her, dragging her up onto the conveyor belt and striking her with harsh and uncoordinated fists. Not out of any disdain for her, or for any living thing, but out of a burning need to _inflict._

And then immediately after comes the need to _run_. Her inflicting draws enough of a ruckus among the guards and other prisoners that it is easy, _too_ easy, to stumble back and out and then in who knows what direction. Running faster than she’s ever run before through halls, through other assembly lines, through bays of trucks—trucks loaded with boxes that take their leave in ten minutes time not knowing that Iku is crouched inside one of them, fuming all the way back into the city. She doesn’t think that whole time, just breathes.

The back of the truck flies open on a pothole and spills her out into the middle of the street—she half-rolls and lands on her left shoulder too hard, distinctly feels and hears something splinter. Doesn’t matter. Very little matters; for a dark second she considers lying here in the street until some other truck roars through and takes her out. But something penetrates, for the first time in six months, the deep numb cloud hovering around her. That something is _rage_.

Iku makes her way, running just as fast and as desperately, to the Crypton Records building.

The alarm is already going off as she slams her way through the sliding door and stumbles volatile into the lobby—Cyva’s quick on that button, it seems. That doesn’t matter, either. Iku wants to scream as she flings herself against the wall to tear down all those damn golden records, force her body to make some anguished sound, but all it manages are the pounds of her frantic footsteps. She can’t think about her body right now—she has to think about the shattering of glass and the great sound those fucking things make as they hit the floor, as she steps on them.

Rin and Len come rushing out in typical name-taking-ass-kicking fashion, but that doesn’t matter either. Her adrenaline rush has her barrelling through the two of them, pushing between them with her shoulders and knocking them off balance too fast for them to react and catch up to her as she makes her way into the bowels of Crypton Records. She’s barely thinking where she’s going or how she’s going to get there—all she knows is what she’s looking for. What she’s looking for, and what she has to do when she finds it. Her feet skid on the polished floors and threaten to knock her off her feet, but some strange and desperate fate keeps her running at her same pace, uninterrupted.

When Iku finds a promising looking door she flings her whole body at it, slamming her already fucked shoulder against the thing with little thought to the pain it shoots through her whole body. All the time she works it she looks around, certain she’ll hear the sound of someone running after her with a gun or with two fists, but the inside of Crypton Records is eerily silent despite the rushing and pounding of her own blood in her eardrums.

She gets the door open soon enough and grins painfully wide at the sight—exactly what she wanted. Records, boxes of records, all stamped with the colorful Crypton Records logo and a neat little “FAUST - THE ZOLA PROJECT” label underneath. Showtime.

Half grabbing and half falling-into the stacks of boxes she sends as many as she can toppling to the ground with a cacophonous sound. She knows she has to move fast because _someone_ will come and stop her— _eventually_. Why is it so quiet? All she hears is the alarm still going, distantly, seemingly ignored. Left to her own devices for the moment she knocks down more boxes, stomps on a few more records; it’s a good start, sure. But she needs _more_.

Stumbling further into the room she finds an answer: the record press, complete with its big bold WARNING DO NOT OPEN lettering on its glass panel cover. Just the thing, solving the problem at its root, but does she dare? Her body answers for her in place of her brain, launching her staggering in the direction of the press, but it’s no skin off her nose. She’s not doing that much thinking, anyway.

Iku ignores the warning wholesale and pulls the glass panel up to reveal the guts of the machine, slumbering dormant in anticipation of birthing more identical Faust records. She stares into its abyss for a long second, impotent rage seething uselessly under the surface as she finally runs out of steam. Okay, the machine’s here. What now? She’s got to wreck it, she knows, but its more complicated than she expected: all control panels and buttons and switches she’s nervous about even in her base adrenaline rush. It’s as she’s sticking her head in to get a closer look that _finally_ footsteps sound behind her. She hears the security guard’s voice without ever seeing him, not even once:

“ _Hey!_ Get away from that press!”

As Iku whips her head around to catch sight of the ruiner of her fun, her prison jumpsuit sleeve catches on one of many levers and tugs it down, making the press roar to life with an ominous churning of machinery. At least now she knows what _one_ of them does. A sickly panic overwhelms her body, gelatinous in her ribcage as she flails desperately to free herself. The security guard is yelling something incomprehensible to Iku in her fear, something that must be important but that she can’t think to answer to, why can’t she just get her _damn sleeve off of this lever?_

She hears the sound of the gunshot a second after she feels white hot pain grazing her thigh, taking her down in an instant and situating her head firmly in between both sides of the still churning press. Iku realizes what’s about to happen only as she feels the great heat that’s encroaching upon her, as she sees that colorful Crypton Records logo and that neat little “FAUST - THE ZOLA PROJECT” label moving in closer and closer and _closer_ as she keeps flailing, kicking her legs uselessly and still unable to _free that fucking sleeve!_ —

As the press makes total, searing contact with the side of her face, all Iku manages to think is _please God let this kill me, I don’t know what I’ll do if this doesn’t kill me_.

She closes her eyes expecting to die and opens them—opens the one that remains in any way that matters—stumbling alone through the Crypton Records parking lot clutching the mutilated half of her face. The space in between those two events is blank, lost to time or like her flesh lost to the press. She’s dimly aware that there’s a hole in her cheek—there’s no blood thanks to the unofficial cauterization the press performed for her. She wants there to be blood, so much blood to characterize how monumentally _shitty_ this is, but the most she gets is the dark red stain on the leg of her jumpsuit where the bullet kissed and missed her. She can hardly even feel her shaking, clammy hand where it’s hiding her disfigurement from nobody—the most profound sensation is that of the night wind, painfully freezing cold. She opens her mouth to scream, but the sound that comes out is a pitiful wheeze.

She runs unfollowed and unbothered, left alone in her agony, with no destination in mind—when she comes to the man-made cement edge of the river it feels like second nature to fall to her knees and tumble into its current, carried off to some new part of the city as she sighs in the cold embrace of the water.

—

The papers that following day, in a minor column under the headline proclaiming the long-awaited opening of the Future Sound, read:

 _MAD TUNESMITH BITES BULLET_ — _Songwriter and convicted doper Iku Acme assaulted a guard and escaped from Sing Sing Correctional Facility yesterday. After vandalizing Crypton Records, Acme was shot by a security guard. Fleeing police she leaped into the East River. Her body was not recovered._


	4. carburetors, man, that's what life is all about

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry to all 3 people who r reading this for the late update, college is beginning to kick my ass more thoroughly than it was before lmao

The long-awaited Future Sound looms tall and imposing over the city street its plentitude of windows face out towards, already buzzing with activity—though all of that will be dwarfed in a shorter time than anyone currently inside is prepared for. A banner hanging over the tall archway of the door proclaims the opening date in eager capital letters, drawing the attention of scattered passersby on the sidewalk below who point up and chatter animatedly amongst themselves as they move on. It’s strange that such a structure should be so plainly available in the middle of the city, situated between two irrelevant buildings as though its always been there—it holds the energy of some grand castle, distant and mysterious but more intriguing than anything that came before or anything that will come after.

The hunched over, shivering human figure that might be Iku Acme—at the very least, was once Iku Acme—limps in the direction of the Future Sound, purpose burning hot and dangerous within her.

She doesn’t bother covering her face anymore, both hands swinging at her sides with the intent of her walk, but it still hurts her somewhere raw and self-conscious to see people gawk and flinch away at the sight—people like the guy just outside the Future Sound’s stage door, whose revulsion gives her the second she needs to slip inside the building unimpeded. The indoor light makes her cringe and bring a hand up again, palm to now rough and unfeeling cheek as she hunches over and dashes up the stairs. She catches brief glances of the inside of the building—the rehearsal from the wings, the chalkboard call sheet with _FAUST PART 1_ in tall, scratched out letters—these things are nothing to her but a knife block for her seething. She’ll come back for them later, in spades. 

Right now she needs two things: new clothes and a new face. The first is far easier than the second: further up the stairs she sees a door helpfully labelled WARDROBE STORAGE, and she lets herself inside with little resistance or notice from the few performers scattered around the stairwell. She shuts the door behind her and her shoulders relax, tension dissipating in the absence of other people. 

Wardrobe storage looks promising— _real_ promising. Costumes line crowded clothing racks from wall to wall, flashy and showman-like and almost too much to take in all at once. Iku peels off her jumpsuit before she’s even fully made up her mind on what she’ll take, balling up the filthy and blood-stained garment and setting it down in an unimportant corner of the room as she scours the racks for something suitable. Something that will hide as much of her body as possible, from herself and from other people—a heavy leather bodysuit crossed by thick metal-riveted belts, the cape and matching leather gloves on the same hanger she assumes must go along with the look. She pulls it off the rack and knows it will fit like a new skin before she even tries it on. 

Satisfied, she scans the room in search of her second goal—first attempting the makeup she finds on an unoccupied vanity, hastily giving herself a thick coat of black lipstick before bringing it up to heavily outline her good eye with the same implement. That’s not enough, and it irritates the burnt half of her face too much to pull off the cover up she needs. Frustrated, she looks hurriedly around the room...and grins at the masks she finds lined up on a shelf above the rack that held her new costume, unseen until this very moment. That works fine, _just_ fine for her. She reaches up and grabs the one that appeals to her most on a snap judgement: silver-chrome and helmet like in construction, the front sloping downwards into a shape not unlike that of a bird’s beak. There are black lenses over the mask’s round eye holes, and she pops out the one on her intact side before sliding it onto her head. It fits like it was modeled on her skull, more comfortable than she could have ever imagined such a strange and clunky garment fitting.

She looks in the vanity mirror once again and takes in the sight of herself now. All that’s visible of her body is her ponytail sticking out the back of it, her one remaining eye wide and marred not by burns but by rage. She grins experimentally and finds the sight of her weird metal mouth no longer She _likes_ what she sees, how little she sees. 

More confident and less nauseous than she’s been in quite some time, Iku delicately walks to the crumpled pile of her jumpsuit and retrieves the bomb, hugging it tight to her chest as she leaves wardrobe storage and rushes back down the stairs like a high school girl on her first date. Showtime at the Future Sound is coming earlier than anyone suspects.

—

Meanwhile on stage, first dress rehearsal is going overwhelmingly mediocre as the Zola Project croons Iku’s bastardized tune in time with the synchronous dancing of five or twenty identically made-up young women.

“ _I was not myself last night, in the morning light I could see the change was showing…”_

Backstage the wings are a madhouse—props passed between hands, costumes getting pinned, stage-frighters getting a stern talking to on _if you can’t go out now how the hell are you gonna go out with a thousand people in those seats?_ Underpaid interns fuss over the logistics of the car they’re about a minute from pushing onstage, talking to the identically made up girls they’re planning to load on top of it. Luka smokes down a habitual cigarette and chews out any sucker who gets close enough to her, gesturing inarticulately.

“You see Miku up there? She's listening. She's watching this whole thing, so don't make me look bad again...All right...Watch the microphones...I want to see plenty of movement up there...Hey, Yuu, leave her alone! Put her down! All right, come on...Let's get going, will you please? Come on, let's get it going over here...Come on. That's it, we’re putting the car over there...All right, girls…”

It gives Iku the perfect window in which to pop the trunk of the faux car, gently place the now-set bomb, and rush off without a trace to watch the rehearsal from a higher vantage point.

_“And as I lost control, I swore I’d sell my soul…”_

Luka harangues the last girl onto the car and pushes it with more than a little difficulty towards the stage, just as some underpaid intern will have to do themselves the night of the real show. The _tick-tick-tick_ ing inside the trunk goes unnoticed over the scattered sounds of the rehearsal—but Yuu swallows hard, twitches a little as his voice stealthily drops out and he watches the car emerge from the wings. He backs away, contemplating his actions, but soon passes Luka on his way frantically off stage much to her obvious displeasure.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?”

“Listen, I gotta get out of here,” Yuu gulps, hands shaking too bad to hold a microphone even if he wanted to.

“What are you talking about?”

“What sign are you?”

Luka raises an eyebrow, but humors him. “Aquarius. So what?”

“Aquarius?” Yuu blinks once, twice, and his shoulders settle a little. “You’re okay. I just gotta get outta here, Luka—”

“Come on, come with me,” Luka grimaces as she throws a less than amiable arm over Yuu’s shoulder and walks further on stage. He tries to resist, wriggling pointlessly in her grasp.

“Listen, I can’t—”

“I wanna show you something.”

“I swear to God—”

“You see Miku sitting in that box up there?” Luka asks curtly as she points upwards. Sure enough, the one and only Miku stands looking down at the stage, leaning against the railing with one elbow and a look of utter boredom carved into her face. Yuu starts to balk.

“Yeah, right.”

“She doesn't show it or anything, but right now, she's thinking: ‘Why isn't Yuu in the car?’ Now, if she comes down here, do you really want me to tell her that it's _not in the stars_ for you to ride off the stage in this car?” Luka’s voice stays the same even volume as she walks Yuu off stage again, but the sound contorts with obvious frustration the further on she goes. Yuu wilts away from her anger and shakes his head meekly.

“No, Luka. I just don’t feel good.”

“You’re gonna feel a lot worse if you don’t do what I tell you.”

“I got this headache and I hear this—this _ticking_ going on, you know.”

“Ticking?” Luka’s face screws up like a dog who’s eaten something unpleasant. “Maybe something’s loose up there.”

“No. There's something weird around here.”

Luka, reaching her breaking point for tolerating bullshit, groans and fishes in the pocket of her denim jacket for an orange bottle of pills Yuu doesn’t recognize. She pours a few out into her open palm and offers them to him.

“Take a few of these.”

Yuu hesitates, but gives in. “You got any water I can use?”

“Just _take_ them,” Luka frowns and brings her open hand to Yuu’s face, taking advantage of his surprise at her sudden motion to force the pills into his half-open mouth. He winces and shuts his eyes tight as Luka brings her hand down to roughly massage his throat and coax him into swallowing.

“Come on...get it down…”

Yuu gives a performative gulp, grimacing as the pills go down in an obtrusive bunch he can feel travel through his throat. He sighs as Luka pats him on the shoulder.

“Better now? No more ticking?”

He hardly has the time to nod before Luka’s shoving him back up on stage with two staggering, clumsy steps.

“All right. Get out there. Come on, get this car out! Let's go! Come on!”

Yuu climbs onto the hood of the prop car with the posture of a man approaching the electric chair, grimly gesturing for Kyo and Wil to join him as they finish out the song on a poppy up beat:

_“All my dreams are lost, and I can’t sleep…”_

Up in the catwalk, Iku ducks away and shields her ears a second before that fateful ticking stops. Miku catches the motion and looks up towards it, drawing her attention away from the stage right at the crucial moment. She puts two and two together from the green hair she sees whip behind the mysterious figure just in time.

_“Old emotions, may they rest in—”_

The explosion immediately and profoundly cuts off all music. Before anyone on stage can comprehend what’s happening the prop car goes up in horrible ear-shattering flames, accompanied by the screaming of girls in both extreme fear and extreme pain. It’s a smaller explosion than Iku may have liked, maybe, but no less devastating or terror-striking.

But for all the hell breaking loose on stage, as performers and crewmates run and tumble over each other in their attempts to flee the scene, it all registers for Miku distantly—she remains looking at the spot Iku’s head was, hardly flinching. Perhaps she’d been expecting something like this. In any case, her heart rate stays steady and her breathing stays even as she politely excuses herself from the box and goes to handle the Future Sound’s pest control problem.

—

Miku suspects she should feel the slightest bit afraid as she strolls the Future Sound’s mirror-lined halls—that maniac could be anywhere in the building, after all, almost certainly in search of her. She even looks over her shoulder once just for posterity as she reaches for the faux light fixture that pops open the mirror-door of her private room. But there is no fear in this body; on the very contrary, she’s starting to find the whole thing actually a little hilarious.

The tapes don’t lie. There are thousands of them in this room, stacked high against one wall waiting to be displayed on the myriad of monitors that line the one across—Miku’s favorite obsession. As she settles into her chair and pulls up footage from one of her innumerable video cameras, there’s no question in her mind that the wannabe terrorist of the Future Sound is none other than one Iku Acme. Miku suspected this would happen, on some level. It seemed far too convenient to her that her plan to keep the little freak out of her hair would have gone off without a hitch. She plays and replays the fraction of the tape in which Iku’s face—or rather, the mask she covers it with—is visible, half a second of her looking and turning away and looking and turning away moments before the bomb went off. 

No problem here. None at all. If anything, this can only _help_ Miku. Shutting the tape off, she keeps a confident smirk to herself as she stands and stretches her arms over her head, brain churning with the plan that sprung forth the second she watched that trademark ponytail swing over her stage on her catwalk.

She hardly bats an eye as Iku accosts her on her way out of the room, pinning her to the doorframe with one brutal arm and roughly shoving a blade up against her throat that gleams in the Future Sound’s overbearing light. She even cranes her neck and grins at Iku, calmer and more in control than she’s felt in quite some time. It’s cute, the way she thinks she has power here.

“Why, Iku! Good to see you. I’ve been looking for you _everywhere_.”

Iku just breathes hard through her teeth, pivoting to face Miku head on and hold the knife at a more obvious and threatening angle. Miku only humors Iku by looking down at it for a second.

“Killing me won’t help you.”

Still smiling, she reaches up and swiftly detaches the front plate of Iku’s mask from the helmet portion, exposing her to the mirrors that surround them on all sides. The effect is immediate—Iku sees herself, her mutilated face, and backs away cowering, a painful hiss emanating from her throat as she stumbles and throws both hands over her face. Miku can’t even pity her enough to laugh.

“God, you’re horrible. Come on, don’t rush off.”

Miku approaches casually, dynamic firmly swapped, and crosses her arms as she looks down at a shivering and now pathetically whimpering Iku. Even with her half-slumped against the wall as she is, she’s still a noticeable deal taller than Miku; but the power she holds makes her feel no less than ten feet tall, cowering over this destroyed wreck of what was once a woman.

“Look at yourself,” Miku commands calmly, gesturing to the mirror they now find themselves in front of with one hand as she holds the mask in the other. Iku continues whimpering, shakes her head no until Miku grabs her arm and forces her to turn. “ _Look at yourself._ ”

In the most mercy she will ever show Iku she offers the mask up, and Iku immediately snatches it and reaffixes it to her helmet as soon as she has the chance. She gurgles out a pained wheeze halfway between deep suffering and some perverted sexual utterance out of context. Miku wrinkles her nose in a childish expression.

“What’s that horrible noise you’re making? Can’t you talk?” Miku taunts more than asks, suspecting the answer even before Iku shakes her head and wheezes again. Iku takes a few lurching steps backwards and turns her back on the mirror, Miku following confidently in her stride.

“Look around you, Iku,” She muses as she grabs Iku’s arms, forces her to face her again. The fear of retaliation is little more in Miku’s mind than a cheesy joke. “You’ve destroyed your face, you’ve destroyed your voice, and now you want to destroy the Future Sound. Haven’t we all had enough?”

Iku wrenches her way out of Miku’s grip and begins to half-run away. Miku points and addresses her in a direct tone that immediately stops her in her tracks.

“I can give you the power to create again,” she boldly asserts, all her sadistic taunting gone from her expression in place of genuine offer. “I can make you somebody.”

Iku flinches like she’ll keep running, but her feet can’t seem to follow through. All her body seems to turn to ice, sliding out of her control as she turns back to face Miku. In the end, she can’t resist the promise, now matter how false and how from the mouth of a woman so cruel, of the thing she misses more than anything else, the biggest hole in herself. Miku can’t hide the pleasure on her face from seeing Iku already falling into place.

“We're gonna have to start all over again, Iku. Only this time working _together_ instead of against each other.” She walks closer to Iku, who tenses up as though approached by some unknown animal...but still remains, doesn’t flee further into the depths of the Future Sound. Miku’s getting to her already—she continues, putting on the amiable tone of someone who’s left being held at knifepoint in the past. “The time for your sound is now. People are going to want to hear your music.”

Suddenly Iku loses what little remained of her nerve, as though something has kicked in or been realized. She starts hurriedly backing away from Miku, continuing to wheeze. Unfazed, Miku walks toward her at a brisk and controlled pace that continually equalizes the distance between the two of them.

“I mean what I say! Tomorrow, I'll put a whole new group together who'll do your songs your way. You don't have to believe me. Come to the auditions and see for yourself. Trust me!”

But by the end she’s calling out uselessly to the back of Iku’s head, cape fanning out behind her as she finally turns and flees down the main staircase of the Future Sound to some unknown and irrelevant location. It’s annoying, sure, but hardly bothers Miku. She knows enough about these composer types to know Iku will come crawling back to her tomorrow morning, will come to the audition, will subject herself further in pointless pursuit of what Miku had offered so easily: _the power to create again_. She saw it in the quivering of Iku’s lip, her hasty retreating steps, that awful _wheezing_ —she’s weak. Even at the moment she had held the knife up against Miku’s throat, her hand had wavered, and she had hesitated.

Miku stands alone in the hall and repeats her words to Iku to herself: “Trust me.” 

She finally allows herself the laugh that’s been itching at the front of her mind this whole time.


	5. special to me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello my beloved 1 to 3 readers im Not dead but all my braincells are  
> its becoming obvious that i. cannot keep to regular updates anymore with the way school and everything is going so i'm still working on this!!! but its probably gonna be a good deal slower than before. thank u for understanding if ur reading this ily

Once upon a time Iku would have called this feeling currently worming in her stomach a gut instinct—a strong enough sign to get the fuck out of Dodge sooner rather than later. But standing here next to Miku, staring down from the box at the line of girls she’s managed to accrue overnight seemingly out of nowhere, Iku figures she can’t afford gut feelings nowadays.

It’s still strange, the way it happened. Iku can’t exactly work out why she came back, why she’s opening herself up to be screwed over once again. Her first rational response is that the only way she can get revenge is to get close—for she _will_ kill Miku, whether it does her good or not (even if the thought still makes her nauseous and panicky). But Iku knows she’d be a fool to think that was it. There’s part of her that still so desperately yearns for that which she was denied, part of her that still scrambles for the opportunity Miku could still give her. And maybe, just maybe, Miku _is_ giving it to her now—without pretense, without deception, as apology. Iku wants to reject that thought, but it stays and leaves its roots somewhere deep and unaccessed in her: still starstruck, despite everything.

There’s a power involved in it, too: the power of the position she finds herself in now, part of the process she’d dreamed of being part of since she was a child. She can’t deny that she feels powerful now, hidden away in the box out of sight and looking down over the line of girls snaking unseen into the wings of the Paradise. Iku doesn’t know how to explain that there’s little use holding an audition—there’s only one girl who can sing her music, after all. Iku searches the line as best she can for those twin drills, heart leaping into her chest on hope alone, but finds nothing.

The woman who swaggers up to the mic like a drunk now is an obvious no, but Iku has to pretend like this is an audition. As the music starts up, the woman pushes her long silver hair out of her eyes with both hands, swings her hips to the rhythm with reckless abandon.

“ _Caught up in your simple feeling, you’ve got no time for—_ uh— _a simple feeling…”_

Yeah, no. Miku turns to look at Iku where she stands equally obscured in the dark of the box, and Iku shakes her head the same way she shook her head for the last fifteen girls. Miku immediately leans into her mic and cuts the poor woman off on her second poorly remembered line.

“Next,” comes Miku’s painfully bored sounding voice over the auditorium speaker system. Like clockwork Len emerges from the wing and grabs the woman by the shoulder, taking the mic out of her hand and putting it back in the stand before briskly leading her off stage. The next woman in line fills in her place smoothly as water fills a gap, huffing out a nervous breath and shaking her arms up a little before she looks up from under the brim of her cowboy hat. Iku recognizes the face in an instant, even before she speaks in the voice she remembers even better.

“Alright, what's your name, sweetheart?” Luka asks apathetically at the audition table, looking over headshots with a glassy stare.

“Teto.”

Before she realizes it Iku brings a hand out and grabs Miku by the shoulder, letting her know already that this is her. This is Teto—who now has a name, a name that Iku rolls on her useless tongue and memorizes the contours of. Miku doesn’t react to this beyond quirking a single eyebrow and leaning further forward out of the box than she’s leaned for any auditionee yet.

“Fine, let’s see what you’ve got, Teto,” Luka sighs, taking a long drag of a cigarette all but in Teto’s face as she settles deeper into her uncomfortable plastic folding chair.

“Do I get to _sing_ this time?” Teto asks without bothering to subdue any irritation, which throws Luka off enough to blink at her in surprise.

“You mean you’re really a singer?”

“ _Yes,_ I’m a singer.”

“Well, try and forget it. We’re looking for screamers, not singers,” Luka jokes, smirking cruelly at her. Teto all but bares her teeth like a dog.

“I’m not a _screamer_ , I’m a _singer!_ ”

Agitated, she heads off stage herself in the same direction the woman before her was hauled off—but not before Miku leans into the mic again, addresses her head on.

“Teto,” her voice rings out the name and immediately causes the woman it belongs to to turn on her heels towards the source she can’t see. “Miku here. I want you to answer a question for me.”

“Yes?” Her voice seems to go higher, maybe even a little afraid as she steps further back on stage. Above all, _hopeful_.

“What would you give me to sing?” Miku asks with an amused grin only Iku is privy to: one that makes her stomach churn without explanation, on gut feeling.

Teto thinks for just a second before she answers. “Anything you wanted.”

“Anything…?” For a second Miku seems almost impressed—but pushes further. “Would you give me...your voice?”

At this Teto grins, cocky, and her shoulders lose their tension as she breathes for the first time since Miku spoke. She steps back, takes the mic off the stand as she stares up into what she sees as the faceless void of the box. “Try me.”

As clear a cue as ever, the music for the audition song strikes up again, and Teto leans into it with confidence like she was born knowing the lyrics.

“ _Caught up in your wheelin’, dealin’, you’ve got no time left for simple feeling...I thought I knew you, but I didn’t know you at all…”_

She slips into it immediately, effortlessly, like a mythical selkie donning her seal skin to retreat back into her ocean home. All at once the sound takes over her body, spinning her in circles, mic cord threatening to trip her. Not like she even _needs_ the mic—her voice carries stronger than any girl who’s auditioned yet, commanding the space, piercing Iku right through her sappy wounded heart. So much of her is so much of Iku, what Iku used to be what feels now like an entire lifetime ago; Iku has never been in love, but she thinks she might be now, more in love than she’s ever loved anyone before. She joked much of her life, to any relative who pestered over her lack of boyfriend at a holiday, that music was her one true love. Well, _this is the girl_ , the girl who is all sound and all music, the girl whose voice travels, the girl who had been so happy for her help that she had hugged Iku tighter and closer than she had ever been hugged before. She wasn’t kidding: she’s a _singer._

_“Well, you told me one time that you’d be somebody, that you weren’t working just to survive...but you’re working so hard that you don’t even know you’re alive…”_

Teto pauses after one particularly hard spin and looks up into the box with an intent look. Iku knows she can’t see her but she feels her gaze still, running deep through her body clear and refreshing as clean water. If Teto was really looking at her, Iku wouldn’t know how to act—already she feels regressed to a high school girl with an embarrassing crush on an upperclassman who doesn’t know she exists. The kind of easy, naive feeling she hadn’t envisioned herself capable of anymore, the kind of feeling she relishes.

_“Working so hard to be somebody special, not working just to survive...well, you’re special to me, babe, and what I don’t see, babe, is where you go once you arrive...where we go once we arrive…”_

“She’s good, isn’t she?” Miku asks knowingly, turning to Iku and raising an eyebrow. _Good_ is an understatement—so good in fact that Iku had forgotten entirely that Miku was here, that anyone in the world existed but Teto and herself half-way. _This is the girl_ , Iku opens her mouth to say, so completely taken in that she forgets herself, the limitations of her body as it stands now. Closing her mouth before an embarrassing squeak can poke its way out, she simply nods in response, hardly conveying the enormity of how much she agrees. Miku understands as much as she needs to, and a pleased grin spreads quick and easy over her face.

“Then let’s talk.”

—

_“I was not myself last night, in the morning light I could see the change was showing…”_

The sound of Iku’s new voice is rough and electronic where Miku is busy building it in the booth, an obscured shadow too far away to fully make out. Clipping and glitching out at frequent intervals, Iku flinches away from the sound coming out of her mouth—well, not out of her _mouth_ , exactly. The speaker box now mounted to her chest buzzes and pings randomly with blue and orange light, indicating active use as it sends sound through the cord plugged into the console and out of the many speakers in the recording studio. Iku herself doesn’t exactly know _how_ it works, and doesn’t feel any profound need to find out. The important thing is that she _can_ sing again— _will_ be able to sing again, eventually, once Miku works it out. _I can’t make any promises_ , Miku had cautioned, but Iku trusted her. Wow, what a world, right? Where Iku trusts her? But she doesn’t have any choice. As much as she trusts, she still tastes bile at the back of her throat, ready to rear up and take over at a moments notice.

_“Like a child who was always poor, reaching out for more, I could feel the hunger growing…”_

“Filters...” Unheard, Miku muses to herself as she adjusts more knobs, hits more buttons. “Dolbys…” Slowly but surely the sound is coming into focus, the singing voice Iku will have the rest of her life; and its a familiar voice. Something about it strikes close to her, triggering some recent memory—something pervasive, omnipresent. But whose voice is this? Whose voice is now hers? Some palatable, universal voice that Iku _knows,_ fucking _knows_ she’s heard before and will know for certain as soon as it clears up its electronic waste—if it ever does. Iku thinks she might go mad, very-nearly-almost recognizing like this. With one more switch it finally clears, and it becomes immediately painfully obvious whose voice Miku has so generously gifted: Her _own_. Coming from speakers on all sides is the perfect universal voice of Miku, singing Faust in what has to be the most profound act of theft in the universe.

_In perpetuity—everything I ever sing, sung by her—Oh my God!_

What else can she do but keep singing?

_“And as I lost control, I swore I’d sell my soul—”_

The nausea roiling up angry in the base of her stomach is quickly overpowered by her shock as Miku unplugs her from the console, the voice immediately dissipating and leaving her in almost painful silence. Her whole body tenses and she searches for the sound, looking around the room like some confused animal; she misses it, despite everything.

Miku takes advantage of Iku’s confusion to lean forward, twist a dial on top of the box mounted on her chest. “How’s that? Try it.”

“Teto,” Iku forces out, throat stinging with the effort of barely managing to express the multitude of anxious thoughts pounding against the walls of her skull. _How will she recognize me? How will she know I’m here?_ And her speaking voice isn’t Miku’s, which is a small blessing—but it’s not much better. What comes from the box is a gargled, electronic trainwreck, clipping and making her wince with the squeal of digital feedback. Not Miku’s voice, but not her voice either, not by a longshot. A voice no human being has—a _non-voice._

Entirely unaware of Iku’s agony, Miku frowns, twists the dial another degree. “Try it again.”

“Teto.”

It’s no better. Iku feels childishly on the verge of tears.

“And again.”

“Teto—”

It’s too much. Iku brings both hands to her ears and pulls off her headphones, grimacing as loud feedback screams at her in protest. Miku returns the expression with benign dissociation from the sound—disgusted by her, not alongside her.

“Well, at least you can talk with this. You can plug yourself into the console for singing.” Miku leans forward over the piano, forgoing the elephant in the room with a look in her eye that suggests a high school sleepover and not Iku’s rapidly developing personal hell. “You really think she’s that good?”

“She’s too good for you,” Iku shoots back, any bite it holds neutered by how the effort of talking makes Iku’s throat constrict halfway through.

Miku responds with a leering grin, eyes deeply unamused. “I’ll hire her anyway.”

Iku’s shoulders droop as her situation starts to sink in, anxiety blurring out into an impermeable depression as every detail works itself out in her head. Idly one hand comes up to feel out the speaker box she supposes is now part of her already so altered body, caressing it, trying to force familiarity. As she thinks about the logistics of it, how it all works, an unwieldy hope comes to mind and she lifts her head towards Miku: “She could be my voice now.”

Even through the distortion her desperation comes through, and it makes Iku feel sick. Especially as she sees the cloying, almost cruel smile Miku gives her in response. “Could she?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s get down to business,” Miku frowns and leans further forward, her _face_ certainly getting down to business already. She talks in a stern tone, as though a guard to a prisoner—which Iku supposes bitterly she is, in some way. “I want you to stop terrorizing the Future Sound, and rewrite your cantata...for Teto,” she tacks onto the end, shrugging like the prospect is a consolation prize. “That way we both get what we want. You get your cantata

sung by the right singer, and I open the Future Sound.”

“Rewrite my cantata…?” The very idea makes her vision swim. It’s hardly possible for her to even _think_ , even harder to _talk_ —the thought of writing seems like a ridiculous fantasy. Not to imagine how _awful_ it would feel to have to sing and rehearse it in _Miku’s_ voice.

“We have no time to waste. Just one week. You must lock yourself up in here and do nothing but write.” Miku offers this casually, as though its a reasonable request. She even has the audacity to smile happily, upbeat and encouraging. “Isn’t it exciting?”

 _Exciting_ wasn’t the first word that came to Iku’s mind; she’d been thinking more _excruciating,_ Sisyphean. But Teto’s face, Teto’s _voice_ , flashes in her mind—the feeling of her arms around her, so gratefully. “I could write for her.”

Miku’s grin splits wider. “Yes. We'll perform here live. And Teto will star!” She does a little flourish with her hands, selling it hard. Iku hates that it’s working on her; that little flutter of hope she isn’t quite sure what to do with rushes back up.

“My cantata...for her…”

Miku nods. “I'll get fantastic musicians. The hall has great acoustics—”

“I don’t trust you, Miku,” Iku backs away from the promise, hackles raising. She can’t let herself fall for this, not now, after everything. “You’ve ruined my music before.”

Miku’s face screws up with displeasure, but she quickly recovers and waves away the concern with one precisely manicured hand. “Forget about the Zola Project. Who wants synthetic anymore?”

“I don’t trust you,” Iku repeats—but her electronic voice wavers.

“You don’t have to,” Miku returns cheerfully. As she speaks she idly maneuvers her way to another side of the room, and Iku watches like a hawk as she leans down and returns into her field of vision with what has to be the most bloated contract Iku has ever seen. Seriously, the thing looks more like a damn _manuscript_. Iku looks up, waiting for the joke, but Miku’s still smiling. She gestures to it vaguely as she speaks. “Here’s a contract. Everything I’ve said and more is in it.”

“I’ll read it,” Iku replies warily, taking the monster of a document into her hands and looking over the first page. She may not have ever broken out into the industry proper, but she’s heard enough horror stories to want to make sure she understands this thing cover to cover. Miku nods in agreement, stepping back as though to give Iku room.

“At your leisure.”

But _fuck_ , if it isn’t a mess and a half to interpret! It’s hard enough to read with one eye, but the language makes Iku’s head spin, legalese to the nth degree. Even by the second page she has to pause, read what’s being said out loud in a half attempt to parse it:

“'The party of the first part gives the party of the second part, and her associates, full power to do with her, at their pleasure...to rule, to send, to fetch, or carry her or hers, be it either body, soul, flesh, blood or goods.'"

She looks up at Miku, who's still standing blithely by and watching her read. “What does that mean?”

Miku hesitates only a second before she gives her airy, unbothered explanation. “Oh—that’s a transportation clause.”

Iku pauses, thinking, but resigns herself and goes back to the massive contract. She’s skimming at this point, taking in the words and making only as much sense of them as she supposes she needs to. Not as though she hadn’t made her mind up already that she’s going to sign, of course. What else is she going to do with herself? A whole lot of nothing, that’s what. She pauses at another phrase that sets off some instinctive hesitation she doesn’t have the context to understand. “All art—” she leans down again to be sure she’s reading it right. “'All articles which are excluded are to be deemed included.'”

She looks up at Miku again, and that smile becomes a grimace for half a second. “That’s—that’s a clause to protect _you,_ Iku.” She steps closer and shrinks the gap between them before any bullshit can be detected—with her standing and Iku still seated at the piano, their height difference is reversed in Miku’s favor. “Anyway, what difference does it make? What choice do you have?”

Despite having come to the same conclusion herself, Iku resents Miku’s position. But she can’t hide from the fact that its _true_. Skimming the contract, Iku finds herself at the final page, staring down that blank space where her name could go: _will_ go. She swallows hard before looking back at Miku with a metal-toothed open frown. “I'll rewrite my cantata,” she finally concedes, pointing menacingly at Miku with one black-gloved hand. “But you'd best play what I write.”

Miku, unimpressed by this display, simply pulls a pen from her shirtpocket. Before Iku can react to grab it, Miku darts forward to sharply pierce the tip of Iku’s extended finger with the pen. Iku winces, blinking in surprise as a drop of her blood falls onto the contract.

“Ink isn’t worth anything to me, Iku,” Miku explains simply, sweetly as she offers Iku the pen and gestures to the contract with a nod of her head. “Now sign.”

Iku gulps, fear starting to spike up in her again. _What choice do you have?_ Miku's voice taunts her inside her own head, disgustingly right. Looking at Miku with nervousness shining in her one remaining eye, Iku shakily takes the pen and signs her name bloody red across the contract’s topmost signature line.

“Excellent,” Miku whispers more than says as she takes the pen from Iku and pricks herself in return. Blood drawn, she retrieves a stamp from the same pocket the pen resided it and rubs her finger over it, stamping a neat and evenly spaced _MIKU_ across the remaining signature line in a deliberate, final action. Iku is suddenly overwhelmed by the funny feeling she did a bad thing.

“And now we’re in business,” Miku explains, smiling at Iku with a single knowing nod that Iku isn’t in on. She grabs the contract in both hands and starts to leave the room with it. “Together...forever.”

Miku’s voice lilts harshly on that last phrase, like she wants to laugh and is forcing herself not to. Iku watches her go until she shuts the door behind her, walking off unseen into the depths of the Future Sound, and that funny feeling only grows and grows until it threatens to swallow up everything inside of her.

—

Sitting once again at her monitors, replaying the day’s footage in the closest thing she observes to a religious practice, Miku does not feel the supervillian-esque glee one might expect from a woman of her demeanor, a woman in her position. Instead what washes over her is a profound calm—the calm that results from everything going as it should, of everything being in its place.

Watching Iku on the tapes, how she hunches over the piano and grimaces with those horrible metal teeth, Miku’s struck by just how pathetic the woman—if she can be called a woman anymore—really is. Not like she hadn’t thought she was pathetic before, but in person there’s a sort of edge to her, like being in a room with a tightly leashed but still rabid dog. Here on video she’s neutered, defanged. Miku can see down to the core of who she is; a sad little woman all but begging to be manipulated, taken advantage of. Of course she’s aware that _she’s_ the one doing the manipulating and taking advantage of, but does she feel bad about it? Even a little? Of course not. People who are easy to use make themselves easy to use; is it her fault for not letting a good thing go when it was all but dropped into her lap?

On the tape Iku growls in her awful synthetic voice— “ _I’ll rewrite my cantata. But you best play what I write.”_ Miku lets out the laugh she’d had to all but bite her tongue to hold back before. It’s just so ridiculous, the way she thinks she can make demands, call any shots in her position. Not anymore—Miku’s eyes drift momentarily away from the monitors and to where the hefty contract rests on her desk, staring fondly over it like a baby in a crib.

That smile goes away as she hears her own voice as it stands on the tape.

“ _Ink isn’t worth anything to me, Iku...now sign._ ”

She expects the sound, but even now it still makes her cringe and shiver up the length of her whole body. Horrible in its own right—warped beyond recognition as the country’s most buzzed about producer, sound layering over sound—a little like Iku’s voice now. But this voice is unnatural not through any technological means, not by the fault of any machine...something preternatural haunts the corners of it, something felt and never understood. The only tangible definition for Miku’s voice recorded is _evil_. Pure evil rendered soundwave, as though curdling the very air it passes through.

 _No, not my voice..._ her _voice._

_"Excellent...and now we're in business together...forever."_

Miku jolts and looks over her shoulder—a moment of weakness. But there’s nothing for her to fear, no one who could come in and hear the awful truth of what she did. It’s easy enough to hide it day to day; easy enough for a diva to decline TV appearances, to refuse recording at any press release or public event. If anything, it’s to be expected—works in her favor, even, gives her an air of mystery the general populous can’t get enough of. No one knows; no one _needs_ to know. She supposes Iku will know soon enough, but by then there won’t be a thing she can do about it. There is no one in the world to hear this ugly truth, this ugly _voice_ , no one but Miku herself alone with her monitors in her private room.

An itching fear starts to disrupt her calm, and she tenses as she feels herself toeing the line of the one emotion about it she cannot allow herself to feel: _regret_. Breathing deeply she reminds herself of all she’s gained, all she’s been given. It’s a small price to pay, for all of that. The voice that comes out of her mouth on the tape is horrible, sickens her somewhere deep inside where part of her must still be uncorrupted and innocent...must still be human. But when she shuts the tape off, shoulders dropping at the exact moment it whirs to a gentle relief of a stop, the voice goes away.

It always does.


	6. phantom's theme

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO!!!! I AM NOT DEAD!!!!!  
> sincerest apologies to my beloved 1 to 3 regular readers but college and finals are kicking my ass right about now which is also why im posting these most recent chapters entirely too late at night bc its the only time i have to write lmao
> 
> but if ur reading this i love u thank u for enjoying my cringe self-indulgent content <3

Iku writes, in the end. What else is there for her to do? Starting out it’s nearly impossible—the sight of all that blank sheet music sends waves of nausea through her too powerful to even let her stand up without feeling like she’ll fall right back over. More than a few times she produces no music other than the crunch of her mask slamming against the top of the piano in desperation. But then from the depths of her rattled, melting mind she summons up the image of Teto—Teto as she was that first night, wide eyed and starry for her audition, Teto as she was so recently commanding the space with her voice as she spun circles on stage and hypnotized Iku completely. Iku imagines Teto as she must be now, rising star of the soon to open Future Sound, the way she must be starry eyed just the same now. Iku can’t wait to see her again. The thought of that moment, fantasy that it is, makes the sound start to come, slowly but surely filling page upon page of notes that eke out of her with the distant near-pain of giving blood.

_“Half asleep I hear a voice...is it only in my mind…? Or is it someone calling me…? Someone I failed and left behind…”_

Part of her hates singing it in Miku’s voice more than she thinks she has ever hated someone before—but still it is more tolerable than she had imagined it being that first time she heard it, when for a burning hateful moment suicide had felt like an ideologically better option. Right, she feels she can live with it now, despite everything. After all, her only other option is even worse; the one time she attempts singing without plugging into the console the sound of her wrecked electronic voice makes her start sobbing, out of both the pain it burns in the back of her throat and how awful and incomprehensible the sound becomes. Still she sings, and still she writes:

_“To work it out, I let them in...all the good guys and the bad guys that I’ve been...all the devils that disturb me, and the angels that defeated them somehow...come together in me now…!”_

She’s the only one around to hear it, at least. Iku does her writing in near complete solitude—something she once had relished the thought of doing, of having no other obligation than to write to her heart’s content. Now that she really has that opportunity, it feels like the most excruciating thing she’s ever tried to do. She sees Phoenix only in her memory, or in the vivid dreams she wakes up from gasping with tears drying on her cheeks. Whatever intern brings her her food and pain pills three times a day is entirely unseen, knocking three times at the door and disappearing again by the time Iku comes to retrieve the tray. Miku visits on rare, sneering occasions to check up on her progress—

“Tasty, Iku, tasty,” she praises as she finishes reading and places the stack of sheet music back on top of the piano. Iku can only groan in response. She watches Miku leave again, knocking primly on the door for Rin and Len to slide it open on the outside for her, and lets out a sigh only she can hear herself as she takes up her pen and yet another blank page. As she keeps writing she wills the image of Teto into her mind, an image that’s now growing only fainter and fainter.

Outside of the recording studio, Miku hums the tune Iku wrote and nods to herself—tasty, indeed. This will work rather nicely. She probably won’t even have to compromise any part of her _own_ vision to do it, either, regardless of whatever Iku might threaten, and if the freak in there really _can_ finish it in a week the Future Sound will open just as planned. As a matter of fact, there’s only one thing she can think of that could fuck the Future Sound at this point—and as Miku nods her head more deliberately to Rin and Len, as Len nods back and padlocks the studio door shut, she feels beyond confident that she’s handled it.

—

“But I thought you _liked_ her, boss,” Luka taps her cigarette into the ashtray on her side of Miku’s imposing office desk as her head slumps into her hand with disbelief at the update she’s been given. It fills Miku with an odd sort of glee, seeing her so bewildered by her whims—a sort of power, knowing she’s unpredictable. Not that a greaseball like Luka Megurine would ever be privy to the inner workings of Miku’s mind in a million years.

“She’s perfect,” Miku explains softly, more invested in engaging a surveyance of her own fingernails than in engaging her second-in-command. “But you know how I abhor perfection in anyone but myself.”

“So Teto is out?” Luka asks, raising one incredulous eyebrow. Miku idly shakes her head, waving one surveyed and approved hand and bouncing the light of the office off the surface of her painted nails.

“No, not out, just—a backup singer. My cantata needs something really…” Miku needs to search for the word, tapping her fingers against her palm and snapping once it comes to her. “ _Heavy_. You can do that for me, right, Luka?”

The initial look on Luka’s face says _no way, baby_ —but eventually she sighs, gnawing her lip anxiously in lieu of lighting up another cigarette. “Yeah, sure, I can try. No promises, though, you know? It’s pretty last minute.”

Miku just smiles—she knows Luka will do it. Off the top of her head she can’t think of a single thing to ask that she isn’t certain beyond a doubt Luka would do in a heartbeat.

Last minute or not, the assorted collection of annoying would-be idols Luka manages to rake in is _impressive_ to say the least. Every variety of voice you can imagine from all corners of the Earth, and yet none capture that essence, that _weight_ that Miku’s knows Iku’s cantata—strike that, _her_ cantata—really needs. Not the mousy bespectacled young girl with the operatic training of a woman twice her age:

_“Half asleep I hear a voice—_ ”

“No.”

Not the hyper-femme princess type whose harsh screamo gives Miku a headache the rest of the day:

_“IS IT ONLY IN MY MIND???”_

“Wrong.”

_Definitely_ not the woman whose face resembles her own so closely she feels as if she’s staring unsettlingly into a black-haired and red-eyed mirror:

“ _Or is it someone calling me—someone I failed and left behind—_ ”

“Wrong again.”

It’s only within the final dregs of Luka’s crop of auditionees that Miku finds anything worth lingering on. The man who steps up to the mic nearly alone on stage does so with the swagger of someone already a rockstar, shirtless and open-jacketed with little to his person but a shiny guitar and the biggest belt buckle Miku has ever seen. He brings a hand up and runs it through his carefully preened hair before launching into an abrasive domination of Iku’s sorry little tune:

_“To work it out, I let them in...all the good guys and the bad guys that I’ve been...all the devils that disturb me, and the angels that defeated them somehow...come together in me now!”_

He slams down on his poor guitar in between every line with a wall of sound that squashes anything else that might hope to exist, overpowering and total. Finishing his piece he straightens his back and raises one arm in a masculine pose, showing himself off as the beefcake he has to _know_ he is, right? Miku looks into his eyes and there is no hint of self-awareness, no flickering suggestion of an act being put on or even a natural personality simply exaggerated. All this is all him, _must_ be all him all the time. That’s what sells it for her. 

“Here’s something she’ll like,” Miku whispers to Luka so as not to block out the music, but they both know it’s bullshit. Miku couldn’t care less if Iku even liked this guy enough to give him the time of day—but he’s exactly what she envisioned from the very start, the moment the idea first wormed its way into her wicked little mind. If she wanted heavy sound, this is _heavy fucking sound_ , in the purest and most complete sense imaginable. Androgynous not for lacking gender but for pouring in so much of it—manly as his voice and his posturing are, his eyes are lined black, lips shiny and jacket shimmering under the stage lights with glitter. Everything, all the time, over the top. Even his name is perfect— _BIG AL._ Miku imagines it on a marquee in all caps as she gives Big Al a firm handshake and makes a call to schedule a press conference that very next day.

—

Iku sleeps through this unseen development, pen rolling out of her hand, dreaming her sweet and fractured dreams of Teto as the candle on her piano dwindles down to little but a wax blot on her new cantata.

—

Walking briskly to the podium as Miku sets stage for her press conference, Luka grits her lipstick-stained teeth as she swats off the journos clamoring around her like the flies they are in her mind. It still doesn’t deter them, of course; she can’t help thinking they must get trained for this somewhere, take some class in sticking their noses where they’re clearly not welcome. Like the little red haired kid at her elbow who’s clutching a camera too big for his skinny frame and staring up at her with wide outraged eyes as he points aggressively at a Crypton Records employee setting up to record—

“How come they get to shoot Miku and we don’t even get to take any pictures of her?”

“Because they’ve got exclusive rights to her life,” Luka snaps at him, grimacing as she reels in the bubbling urge to slap him across the face too for good measure. The redhead and his annoying friends balk at that, erupting loudly into about half a million outraged comments she can’t respond to and frantic questions she can’t answer. She’s more happy to see Rin and Len coming up ahead of her than she thinks she’s been in a long time—all it takes is a nod and the twins are scooping up these wannabes and hauling them off into the irrelevant distance, one under each arm as they try to kick and squirm their way out.

“I’ll sue you!” One shouts audibly, voice cracking adolescent and infuriated—probably the redhead, Luka thinks with a weary grin to herself. Not that it bothers her; if she had a dollar for every legal threat that’s been sent her way she’d be a rich woman, and if she had one for every threat that actually followed through she’d be broke. All she does is shout back in his vague direction as she takes her place behind Miku on the makeshift stage they’ve set up in front of the plane that flew Big Al into the city barely an hour ago.

“Remember, _no pictures of Miku!_ ”

Thankfully the crowd of _professional_ reporters has already gotten the message—the sea of faces in front of the stage hold in their hands only notepads and pencils that are already furiously scribbling before Miku has even taken to the microphone. They’re just as enthusiastic, however, raising hands and going completely unacknowledged as they call out Miku’s name.

“Miku! Miku! Miku, hey!”

And so on and so forth. Breathing deliberately, in and out, Miku takes in the scene before her with a subdued pleasure before taking two weightless steps forward and tapping the mic before speaking into it with a clear and obvious voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I want to tell you of our latest work. It’s an opera. A kind of...pop cantata. It was written by the late Iku Acme,” Miku adds with a calculated sober tone as she removes her hat and holds it to her chest, pausing to take in the awe that passes visibly over the crowd of reporters—the unshakable status of the dead artist. The corner of her lip twitches in a smile she just barely manages to keep at bay. “It tells the story of a young man who sells his soul to the devil to become the world’s number one idol...it will be the first pop version of Faust.”

A shifty looking reporter at the front of the crowd looks left, then right, before surreptitiously slipping a camera from his jacket pocket into his hands. Rin approaches him on what by now is muscle memory, yanks the thing out of his hands with no comment but to move like she intends to smash it before stepping back again. The look of terror on the man’s face in the second he really thinks Rin will is proof enough he won’t screw up this very basic rule of public Miku appearances again. None of this exists in the scope of Miku’s mind, beyond her notice and far beyond her priorities.

“We’ll be recording at the Future Sound Friday night, live on the Crypton label.” The subtle drop in her voice sets off the crowd of reporters once again on a well-trained instinct, immediately breaking their composed listening state to pick up shouting for attention and raising their hands for questions like the world’s most invested schoolchildren. Miku scans the crowd and picks out the first face she can manage to put a name to, a relaxed looking woman in the back who pushes her thin ponytails behind her as she straightens her back with the sound of her name.

“Ms. Tianyi.”

“Yeah, Ms. Miku, who’s gonna be singing this? The Zola Project?”

Miku shakes her head, keeping mild eye contact. “No, no. They’re a reflection of the past.” With rehearsed theatrical timing, she allows her face to slide easily into a knowing smile. The crowd immediately takes notice, of course, all idle chatter shutting up in anticipation. Even after all this time, it still fills Miku with a kind of latent pleasure somewhere in the back of her psyche. Potently aware of every eye on her, she gestures with her whole arm to the elephant in the room—the extremely large and glittering prop coffin that sits next to her onstage, uncommented upon until this moment. She hears dozens of breaths catch in dozens of throats, watches the wave of every head turning at the same time; the smile twitches at the edges with meaning for her and her alone. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the future: _Big Al._ ”

Now it’s showtime—since everything is a show for Miku, and of course this is no exception. Just as rehearsed, Kyo and Yuu emerge from either side of the coffin to an ominous pre-recorded organ note that has the audience gasping in awe even before Wil steps up to pull open the coffin prop’s lid and reveal Big Al inside. Shirtless and made up to the nines with metallic body paint and glitter in his hair, for a moment all he does is stand still: a perfect opportunity for every journalist present to ogle his Adonis-like chiseled form. He turns his head to face the crowd—opens his eyes, fluttering long lashes as though emerging from a long and pleasant sleep—then draws his lips back into a harsh animalistic snarl, accompanied by a low and guttural growl that for one moment seems genuine threat despite the performance of it all.

It _is_ performance; an hour ago Miku told him what to do and now he’s done it. Fake as it all may be the crowd eats it up willingly, happily as they cry out and as a million yet-unused camera flashes go off in quick succession. Miku shys back against the side of the plane on instinct, wilting from potential view through a lens—but watching them all watch him, an pleased grin spreads over her face, too-white teeth on display in an unconscious mirroring.

—

“Hello!...Iku…?”

Iku groans and opens her good eye at the feeling of someone’s hand falling too-firm over her own, shaking her lightly but with a firm and undeniable insistence. She raises her head just a little and blinks the lingering sleep away to see the face of her visitor: Miku smiling like it’s her birthday the second she realizes Iku is conscious enough to recognize _her_.

“Iku. Good morning.”

“Ah...what day is it?” Iku responds, the grogginess in her voice evident even translated through the speaker box.

“Thursday. Today is Thursday.” There’s something in Miku’s tone that’s a little too cheerful, a little too friendly, and it puts Iku on edge just enough to feel a lump in her throat but not enough to fully penetrate her exhaustion. That lump only grows larger as Miku hauls a briefcase up onto the top of the piano and opens it to reveal a veritable pharmacy of prescription pill bottles, taking one and shaking a few into her hand before offering them to Iku. “Breakfast,” she explains cheekily, gesturing for Iku to take them. Iku didn’t get a chance to see the label of the bottle they came out of, but she suspects they’re just more pain pills—she can feel her last dose starting to fade off, her face and throat prickling with the foreshadowing of future agony. In any case, she’s too tired to protest, anyway. Feeling oddly resigned, Iku palms the small handful of pills in her gloved hand and swallows the bunch of them dry.

“So how’s it coming?” Miku asks, leaning over the edge of the piano as the pills work their way more cumbersome than expected down Iku’s throat. “Don’t mean to rush you, of course.”

“Don’t worry. It’ll be finished,” Iku promises, smiling a little with a brief flash of metal teeth. “How’s Teto doing? I can’t wait to hear her sing.”

“Oh, Teto is doing _beautifully_ ,” Miku promises, right back, waving her hand as though to dismiss even the thought of anything else being the case. “Can’t wait to see you, by the way. Tomorrow night’s the big night.”

That only makes Iku smile even wider, despite herself. Even with her looming pain, even with her exhaustion (which seems only to be growing stronger and stronger the more time she spends awake), she can’t help being a little excited about all this. However horrible the circumstances, this _is_ her first real show, isn’t it? Is it really wrong to be excited about it? If it is Iku doesn’t know what to do with herself. For now she nods, even laughs a little. “Tomorrow night.”

Imagining it makes her feel happy—happy for the first time in a long time, really truly happy. It’s enough to send her already dreamy brain into enough of a fantasy to ignore Miku yanking a chunk of her new cantata out from under her arm and making off with it, leaving the room with no more communication beyond a girlish little wave moment before she pulls the metal door open. Well, Iku can’t think about that now. In fact she finds she can’t think much of anything; as Miku leaves, her tiredness rears onto its hind legs and overpowers her completely, leaving her passed out hunched over her piano again within mere minutes.

Outside Miku sighs, and her shoulders droop considerably as she lets down the difficult facade of friendliness. Her mouth presses into a thin no-nonsense line as she looks to Rin and Len, posted outside the recording booth already in preparation for their task. Looking beyond them, she snaps her fingers to the small gaggle of Crypton Records employees and the pallet of bricks they’ve paused wheeling in. She doesn’t have to communicate any more than that for them to spring into action; as Miku takes her leave they kneel and start stacking bricks against the wall next to the door, waiting ominously for the moment they’ll be called upon for little but one more slight against the slumbering, blissfully unaware Iku.

—

_“Our love is an old love, baby!”_

First rehearsal with the addition of Big Al, and its going...well, at least it’s _going_. Going ‘well’ may be a stretch. Big Al brings back out his audition shtick of abusing his poor guitar as he squeaks and screeches out the lyrics in front of him with an obvious strain on his vocal chords. On either side of him little groups of backup singers sway casually back and forth and try not to laugh or cringe at the trainwreck going on center stage—including the recently demoted Teto, who rolls her eyes where she’s giving Big Al more than a few sideways glances.

“ _It’s older—”_ Big Al pauses his banshee-like rendition of the song to lean forward and look over the lyrics once more. “ _—than all our years—”_

One particularly harsh and nearly pubescent voice crack pushes Big Al past the limit, and he furrows his brow as he pulls his guitar over his head with some difficulty and sends it crashing vindictively to the stage, promptly putting an end to all sound. He takes a few swaggering steps in the direction of the box Miku is half-watching him from, hands on his hips as he looks up and huffs. “Lady, you better get yourself a castrato for this, ‘cuz it’s a little out of my range,” he complains sarcastically, gesturing back at the sheet music stand with one flailing and exasperated arm.

“Something bothering you, Al?” Miku responds, sounding as though nothing in the world could interest her less.

“Miku, this was scored for a chick,” Big Al explains, gesturing once again to the offending music with more force. The hand returns to a solid angry hold on his hip as he continues. “I’m not doing it in drag.”

“You can sing it better than any woman.” Miku shrugs, turning her attention away to something more pressing than an outraged prima donna. It seems to have been the right move—Big Al quirks an eyebrow, thinking it over, then comes to about the same conclusion as Miku with a clear change in his posture that shows the ego boost has landed. Teto crosses her arms over her chest and rolls her eyes harder.

“You don’t know how right you are, Goliath,” Big Al all but purrs in response, walking back to the mic and taking it up again in his rejuvenated self-aggrandizement. “Alright boys, from the bridge!” He calls out to the members of the band behind him as he picks his own guitar up, ready for another crack at it. “Hit it!”

_“Our paths have crossed and parted, this love affair was started long, long ago!”_

Whether it’s any ‘better’ this time around is pretty impossible to say; at the very least it’s more confident, more involved (even considering the less than enthused choreography of the backup singers). Big Al works his way into the song, _forces_ his way into it even as his rough masculine voice dominates its sensitive lyrics. Well, at least _someone_ is having fun. He pulls the mic from its stand and heads off with it down the stage’s catwalk, kicking and spinning wild circles as he keeps going.

_“THIS LOVE SURVIVES THE AGES! IN ITS STORY LIVES ARE PAGES! FILL THEM UP—MAY OURS TURN SLOW—”_

Big Al’s over-the-top one-man show comes to a quick and embarrassing end as one particularly high kick sends him crashing onto his ass and sends the mic rolling out of his hands. He scrabbles to get up again—only to be thwarted by his heavy platform shoes, unable to get him the leverage he needs to pull himself onto his feet. Soon enough he’s falling all over again, grunting with the obvious effort of attempting pathetically to stand. Teto has to put her hand over her mouth to stop from just flat-out laughing at him, though she doesn’t know why she feels the need to grant him that courtesy.

After what should be an embarrassingly long time for anyone over the age of three to accomplish, Big Al manages to right himself once again, brushing himself off with an indignant look and grabbing the mic on his way up. “Who says I can’t sing it!?” He announces as half-pep talk and half-challenge, free hand curling into a tight fist at his side as he simultaneously brings his foot down on the stage to punctuate his assertion with a sharp slamming of one of those damn shoes.

“I like it. Keep working on it,” Miku encourages with a single definitive nod—oddly enough, more genuine a sentiment than anyone would have expected. _Definitely_ more genuine than any of his co-performers would have said the same thing, in any case. “Drop an octave here, change a line there, give it a beat. Make it completely yours.” With that final sentiment she turns and descends into the deeper guts of the Future Sound, leaving Big Al to his now properly inflated ego as he swings the mic idly by its cord.

“Far out,” he announces to the crowd of crew members and chorus singers, either not bothering or unable to keep how pleased he is with himself out of his voice. He struts back to his place on the main stage and eyes up the sheet music again, biting his lip as he seems to be mentally cutting it up and switching it around already. “Doesn’t that kind of change the whole thing?” He asks the remaining authority in the room—a bored looking Luka, sitting in the front of the audience seats with her feet up on the row in front of her and a cigarette burning down between her fingers. She shrugs noncommittally.

“You heard what she said, make it yours. I mean, if it sounds good, nobody's gonna care what it's about.”

“Is that so?” Big Al counters, raising an eyebrow.

“Nobody cares what anything's about,” Luka doubles down, bringing her feet down and instead resting her shoulders on the seat in front of her as she leans forward. “Who the hell listens to lyrics, anyway?”

“Dry up, sister,” Big Al shoots back with a catty bite to the words, but he supposes he agrees. Who the hell listens to lyrics, anyway. Not if it sounds good. And it _will_ sound good—he turns and addresses the band again to start the song over, getting in all the practice he can before the Future Sound’s rapidly approaching opening night.

—

In Iku’s beautiful, drug-haze dream, she’s standing somewhere clean and full of life, sunflowers blurred in even rows behind her, the earth in front of her stretching incoherently into white sand and dazzling blue ocean. She can’t feel anything, but somehow it seems okay just to see, to watch things and not be one. Teto’s standing in front of her and she asks Iku to take off the mask, her voice making up the very substance of the coastal wind that blows her loose hair behind her in a vague and appealing red shape. Iku does it without a word and Teto doesn’t scream, or flinch, just takes Iku’s ruined face into both of her immaculate hands and pulls her into a soft and loving kiss—

In the real world, Miku looms over Iku’s hunched unconscious form and looks down at her with little more than an unaffected disgust, as though looking upon the corpse of a rat in some corner of a subway station. For a second she approaches something close to a second thought, an uncanny keen awareness of harm done to another person...but she bites her lip and the feeling passes. It always does. After all, such a line of thought would require her to consider Iku as something close to human. Her eyes drift away from Iku’s pliant and drooling sleep expression to get a good look instead and what exactly it is she’s drooling on: the final page of her new cantata, marked appropriately with _THE END_ in thick capital letters where it sits on top of the rest of the intimidating piece. Miku leans forward and cautiously begins to slide the stack of paper out from under Iku’s head—she doesn’t know why she bothers, considering how strong the pills she slipped Iku are. There’s no chance of her waking up for at least the next few hours...still, something makes Miku hesitate, as though she were firmly sixteen again and naively believed things might not go her way sometimes. She does not like that version of herself—she banishes it with a harsh yank of the cantata out from Iku, clutching it to her chest like a baby as she hurries out of the room. 

Sure enough, Iku makes no indication of the profound violation that’s just been done to her, lost completely in her beautiful dream of that which she can never have. Miku in that moment feels more revolted by her than she has felt by another living thing in years. The feeling comforts her.

“Seal it now,” she murmurs with her head down to the crew of workers in the hall outside the booth, already on standby with bricks in hand and mortar mixed. It’s all she can manage to get out—suddenly her body is cold, shivering, as though momentarily passed by a ghost. She exorcises the feeling and moves on, focusing her intent, thinking of nothing but Future Sound and the opening night to end all opening nights looming ahead of her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh god these chapters are gonna start getting long as fuck


End file.
